The Botanical Collection - The Herbarium
The Botanical scientific collection
Our botanical collection consists of The Botanical Garden and the herbarium. The botanical garden, the living cacti and succulent plants, are a part of the botanical collection. The herbarium is a part of the "dead" collection. A herbarium is a collection of dried and pressed plants. The herbarium is not open for general visits but you are more than welcome to visit the living part of our collection at any time!
What is a Herbarium?
A herbarium is a collection of dried and pressed plants. It can be compared to a library of past and present plants.
Every plant in the collection is attached to a special paper along with a label. The label tells you what species the plant is, where and when it is found, who found it, who identified it, and how it looked where the plant was found alive and growing. The herbarium contains algae and mosses as well.
We have approximately 80 000 dried plants in our herbarium. Most of the plants are collected from Agder. The oldest plants are from the 1830’s, more than 190 years old!
The herbarium is not open for general visits but we do occasionally arrange guided tours, especially upon educational or scientific requests.
Herbarium sheet and lable. Photo: Malene Østreng.
Living collections
The botanical garden, the living cacti and succulent plants, are also a part of the botanical collection. We call them the living botanical collection. Our cacti and succulent plants are placed in a separate greenhouse because they need a warmer environment than the rest of the plants in the botanical garden.
The living plants have a small sign with information, in the same way as the plants in the herbarium have a label. We have knowledge of where all the living plants originated from, and how and when they arrived at the museum. The herbarium is not open for general visits but you are more than welcome to visit the living part of our collection at any time!
Watch the video of botanist Malene Østreng Nygård. Malene talks her job as a botanist at the museum.
The importance of the botanical collection
The botanical collection has great scientific value. It makes it possible to study evolutionary changes (DNA), distribution and occurrence, in time.
A big part of the collection is irreplaceable. Some of the plants are presently extinct, locally or globally, and some plants came from an environment that no longer exist.
The scientific collections are very important for research on changes in biodiversity. The collections are a source of knowledge. They can help us understand many of the challenges and threats we face today, for example challenges associated with endangered species, invasive species, climate changes and the spread of infectious diseases.
The scientific collection has a cultural value as well. A lot of well-known botanists, zoologists and geologists have left their mark on the collections with names and references of where they had been, their interests and findings.