The Garden’s herbarium houses our pressed plants, including specimens relating to our scientific research.
An herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens that acts as a permanent record of that species.
Herbarium collections provide a vital resource for researchers. We use them in taxonomic research to compare different species. We can find out about past distributions of plants by looking at where specimens came from. We can also extract the DNA from these plant specimens for use in our DNA barcoding and conservation research.
Our herbarium at the National Botanic Garden of Wales contains the plant specimens collected as part of our research and seed banking. It also houses the James Cosmo Melvill herbarium of British plants which was kindly donated to the Garden by Harrow School.
Thanks to funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Dynamic Collections initiative, we have been busy conserving and digitising this collection. By June 2026, we will make a large proportion of the collection accessible through a searchable online portal for anyone to explore.
A vital part of the digitisation work is to capture as much relevant information as we can from the handwritten specimen labels. We have a small in-house team of volunteers helping us with this label transcription, but with over 20,000 specimens to transcribe, we now need your help!
We have joined DigiVol, an international digitisation platform, to help us reach our targets and to share the joy of transcribing.
If you’d like to get involved, then all it takes is a quick and easy sign-up with the Atlas of Living Australia:
Once you’ve created a profile, you can start your transcription journey by clicking the button below:
The Plants Past, Present and Future project is digitising our herbarium and is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund Dynamic Collections initiative, made possible thanks to National Lottery players.
