Three films are shown which take you through the origin of plant hunting – the process of collecting plant specimens from the wild, plants in Victorian culture, the rise of herbaria to store specimens for botanical study, and finally an overview of the Comber family who have provided a number of specimens to the University of Sheffield Herbaria, and all have ties to botany.
The University of Sheffield Herbarium, looked after by the School of Biosciences, is a collection of around 12,000 dried plant samples which span 170 years of floral history from the British Isles and more, with our earliest specimens collected in 1853. It houses a diversity of specimens including mosses, fungi, lichen and the more commonly recognised flowering plants and trees from the UK, Scandinavian countries and even swathes of Africa and America.
Herbaria are collections of dried plants, often mounted on paper with their genus and species name noted alongside information pertaining to their collection such as location, date and who collected them.
They are invaluable research assets, acting both as a bank of historical knowledge for researching past plant life, the impacts of climate change, molecular analysis and ethnobotanical studies highlighting the relationship between people and plants, among many other topics. As well as providing a store for current modern botanical research since plants collected in the field for analysis must be retained for follow up research and peer review if necessary.