Botanical specimens

Plants and plant products appear in museum collections in many forms. Environmental and storage conditions that are ideal for a botanical specimen are generally good for products made from parts of the same plant. Composite objects, however, must be considered for all the different materials they contain, and an environmental compromise reached that will be the best for the thing as a whole. Sometimes the best treatment for a composite object is to take it apart so that the different materials can be stored separately. 

Traditional botanical specimens are plants that have been pressed, dried, and mounted on a standard-sized sheet of high-quality, acid-free paper. Most herbaria use paper that is specifically made for this purpose. Seeds and small plant parts are contained in seed packets, which are folded out of high-rag, acid-free paper. These may be attached to the larger botanical sheets to which they are related, or stored separately. 

Some botanical specimens may be wet-preserved, stored in a solution of 70% ethanol (alcohol) mixed with water. These are usually bulky or woody materials that do not lend themselves to pressing, such as tubers, thick stems, bark, or succulents. 

As colors and textures of plants usually change as the specimen dries, and the general shape may be altered by pressing, photographs or accurate drawings are an important part of any botanical collection. The appearance of the living plant is an important part of the data on a specimen. Photos may also record the environment in which the plant was found, and what other species were present. 

Wood specimens made consist of slices, cores, or other cut samples of varying sizes. Bark is also kept as part of a specimen, although often separately. 

---

A vacuum-microwave combination has been used for processing tissues for light microscopy (Kok and Boon, 1996), transmission electron microscopy of animal tissues (Giberson, 2001) and botanical specimens (Russin and Trivett, 2001), and scanning electron microscopy of human lymphocytes (Demaree, 2001). 

How do we explain the collection of botanical specimens, animal skins, rock samples, and Native American artifacts by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their famous expedition along the Columbia and Missouri rivers ... 

Clark, J.Y. (2004) Identification of botanical specimens using artificial neural networks. In Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CIBCB 04), La Jolla, CA, IEEE Press, San Diego, pp. 87-94. 

Englemann, G. (1986). Instructions for the collection tind preservation of botanical specimens. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 73 504-507. 

These results seemed to establish with certainty that the active component of tube curare is derived from Chondrodendron tomentosum, but the matter again became doubtful when King reported that in the stems of a carefully authenticated specimen of the plant, collected at Tarapoto in Peru, he had found 1-curine and Z-tubocurarine chloride. This is the first recorded natural occurrence of the latter and seems to indicate either that the alkaloidal components of the plant are not constant in character, or that the botanical description of Chondrodendron tomentosum covers two species containing the dextro- and Icevo- quaternary alkaloids respectively. 

In the annual report of the British Columbia Botanical Office in Vancouver for 1914, prepared by the Provincial Botanist in charge, John Davidson, there appears an illustration, here reproduced (Fig. 1), showing a branch of Douglas fir laden with white masses of a sugar-like substance the photograph was prepared from specimens received by the Office from its correspondent James A. Teit, of Spence s Bridge, British Columbia, who, in connection with his ethnological work on the plants... 

In these pictures, bright contrast comes from scattering of the acoustic waves by elastic homogeneities in the depth of the specimen. The elastic microstructure of botanical sections has also been studied (Kolodziejczyk et al. 1988). 

An extremely rare cultigen, found only at a few locations In Oaxaca. There are specimens In botanical gardens, and In a few private collections, but lack of genetic diversity Is a concern. 

PLANT MATERIAL. - S. divinorum was cultivated by the author at home and at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens. Voucher specimens have been deposited at the University of Michigan Herbarium. 

The flowers of S. divinorum have been the focus of some past confusion. The flowers have white corollas and purplish calyces (1). In Epling s 1962 botanical description of S. divinorum, he mistakenly describes it as having blue corollas (9). He had never seen living flowers, and his statement was based on Hofmann s description of "blue flowers crowned with a white dome" (16) which were actually flowers that had blue calyces and unopened white corollas. The mistake was eventually discovered and corrected by other researchers when the specimen Epling was cultivating bloomed (1). 

W TROPICOS Nomenclatural and Specimen Database of the Missouri Botanical Garden... 

Unfortunately, I am no longer able to supply collectors numbers for all voucher specimens that were prepared in the course of these studies. But in most instances, except for a few samples obtained from herb dealers and local markets, such specimens were deposited in the national or university herbaria in the geographical area of origin and in the Economic Botany Herbarium of the Botanical... 

---