Swedish Museum of Natural History

Swedish Museum of Natural History
Type	Natural history museum and herbarium
Website	nrm.se
Founded	1819
Base	Stockholm, Sweden
Scope	International
Focus	Natural history collections, research and public exhibitions
Other sites	Herbarium catalogue

The Swedish Museum of Natural History (Naturhistoriska riksmuseet) is a Swedish government agency and museum in Stockholm. Its herbarium, registered in Index Herbariorum under the code S, holds more than 4.4 million specimens of plants, fungi and algae. The herbarium catalogue lists 245 specimens of Cannabis, most of them gathered in Sweden. Among the others are six sheets that David Hummel collected in China in 1927 and 1928 on Sven Hedin's Sino-Swedish Expedition.

Status and governance

The museum is a state agency. Under a government ordinance of 2007 its first task is to promote interest in, knowledge of and research on the structure and development of the universe, the earth and life. The same remit covers biodiversity, human biology, the environment and the landscape. The agency must care for, catalogue, study and enlarge the collections entrusted to it and keep a selection of them open to the public. The ordinance also makes the agency responsible for pollen monitoring in Sweden. A head of agency leads it.

The collections began with the natural history cabinet of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which held its first meeting on 18 August 1739. The first botanical collection was laid out in 1758. The Academy's collections were opened to the public in 1786. The botanist Olof Swartz became their intendant in 1806. The museum was formally instituted in 1819. In 1841 separate intendants were appointed for the botanical, mineralogical, entomological and invertebrate departments. A new museum building at Frescati, of about 20,000 square metres, was completed in 1916. The museum was separated from the Academy in 1965 and became an agency in its own right.

The herbarium

The herbarium is kept by the museum's Department of Botany. Its main collections are the moss herbarium, the fungus and lichen collection, the algal collection and two herbaria of vascular plants. The International Herbarium has about 1.5 million plants from around the world. The Nordic Herbarium has more than a million collected in the Nordic countries, mostly in Sweden. A Linnaean collection of about 4,500 sheets includes specimens that Linnaeus gave to his students and that later reached the Academy's collections. The herbarium holds more than 110,000 type specimens. The catalogue's figures, updated on 9 October 2026, are 4,434,000 specimens in all, 2,493,638 of them entered in the database. The vascular plants number 2,950,000, of which 1,519,637 are entered.

Sino-Swedish Expedition collections

Sheet S-GH-1666, Hummel 1330 (1927), from a cultivated plant at the expedition's Camp XI in southern Mongolia, 1 August 1927.

Plants collected on Sven Hedin's expedition to north-western China in 1927–1935 are in the herbarium, on printed labels headed Expeditio centrali-asiatica sub duce D:ris Sven Hedin. A search of the museum's flowering-plant dataset on GBIF for Hedin's name returns 6,892 entries dated 1927 to 1935, almost all from China. D. Hummel is the collector of 3,924 of them; other collectors named include Nils Ambolt, Birger Bohlin and F. Bergman. Of the 4,341 specimens GBIF lists under the collector name D. Hummel, 4,304 are at the museum. Hummel also gave lizards, snakes, frogs and fish to the museum's vertebrate department.

Cannabis specimens

A search of the herbarium catalogue for Cannabis returns 256 entries: 245 specimens and 11 pollen preparations. Of the 245, 238 are filed as Cannabis sativa, six as Cannabis to genus only and one as Cannabis chinensis. The catalogue places 219 in Sweden, six in China, three each in Finland and Denmark and one each in India, Asian Russia and Switzerland; eleven carry no country. None is marked as type material. Seven have images online. The dated specimens run from 1702 to 2016. GBIF, which republishes the vascular-plant catalogue, lists the same 245 specimens.

The earliest dated sheet, S-MG-361, is from the Herbarium vivum of A. Münchenberg and dated 1702. Its label reads "[Gotland] In agris" (in fields), with the note "Hamp.". A sheet collected by J. E. Forsström in 1798 in the Uppsala academic garden came with the herbarium of Casström. Olof Swartz's herbarium contributes an undated sheet filed as Cannabis chinensis, with no locality.

Several entries are drug or fibre samples or carry notes on use. Two undated samples were presented by a Mr Warrington. One is labelled "Gunjah, pr. Calcutta", an infrutescence (fruiting head) determined as var. indica and placed in West Bengal. The other, leaves and seed pods from "Ostindien" (the East Indies), is labelled "Bang l. Subjee". A sheet collected by C. Scheppig in 1891, from plants raised from seed he had received from Th. von Heldreich of Athens, is determined as Cannabis indica. Its label states that this species yields hashish. Another entry is hemp fibre teased out of old rope and used for caulking the seams of ships.

Of the 219 Swedish sheets, 190 date from 1901 or later and 104 from 1990 or later. Some record cultivated plants. Recent labels record plants on rubbish tips, such as one on sewage sludge at Björkholmstippen in Uppland in 1997. Others grew from birdseed, such as one in a balcony box at Lidingö in 2007 that came up unintentionally from a birdseed mix.

The six sheets from China are Hummel's. Number 1330 is a cultivated plant from Camp XI in southern Mongolia, collected on 1 August 1927, which the museum places in Inner Mongolia; G. Samuelsson identified it as Cannabis sativa in 1931. The other five are from the Bogdo Ola (Bogda Shan) in Xinjiang and are dated between 7 June and 31 August 1928. The museum catalogues them as Cannabis, to genus only.

Catalogue, images and access

The online Herbarium Catalogue gives each specimen a page under its registration number, such as https://herbarium.nrm.se/specimens/S-GH-1666. It searches scientific names only. It lists a specimen under the name it is filed under in the herbarium. Not every specimen has been entered. The museum asks that specimens be cited by registration number, written without spaces and beginning with "S". The vascular-plant data are also published on GBIF in the dataset Phanerogamic Botanical Collections (S).

The museum publishes that dataset under CC BY 4.0, and its GBIF entries for specimen images carry the same licence and name the photographer. Its page on open data says that, as a state agency, its data are generally open and belong to the public domain (CC0), but that there are exceptions. The same page says that all its data and datasets carry open Creative Commons licences. The terms of its website state that text and images on nrm.se are protected by copyright. They ask anyone who wants to reuse them to request permission by email.

The botanical collections were closed for several years for renovation. The catalogue's start page states that they are open again for loans. It adds that visits to the collections would reopen gradually during the second half of 2025. Loan requests, donations and other questions go to herbarium@nrm.se. Visitors must arrange a time in advance by the same address. Loans go to herbaria registered in Index Herbariorum. Specimens from the historical collections are not lent. Index Herbariorum adds that there are no loans from the Linnaean or Swartz herbaria.

Accessions

Accessions held at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

	Collector	Collected	Country	Catalogue number
Hummel 1330 (1927)	David Hummel	1 August 1927	China	S-GH-1666
Hummel 164 (1928)	David Hummel	7 June 1928	China	S-GH-4806
Hummel 679 (1928)	David Hummel	1 August 1928	China	S-GH-4809
Hummel 874 (1928)	David Hummel	19 August 1928	China	S-GH-4810
Hummel 908 (1928)	David Hummel	31 August 1928	China	S-GH-4807
Hummel 909 (1928)	David Hummel	31 August 1928	China	S05-59
Münchenberg 361 (1702)	A. Münchenberg	1702	Sweden	S-MG-361

See also

• David Hummel
• Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle
• Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew