Talk:Medley Wood 3849 (1887)
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Evidentiary scope
This is the oldest sheet the KwaZulu-Natal Herbarium holds of the species and the oldest South African gathering in the batch after the Kew sheet of 1857. The catalogue gives a collector, a number, a date and a locality. It is a single gathering and shows neither a continuing population nor a living germplasm holding, so it supports neither a landrace nor a feral classification. The accession is classified Other. No conservation priority is assigned.
The Botanical Database of Southern Africa publishes no image of this sheet. Its image count is zero, and so is the image count of all 1,361,966 rows in the database: the store is empty, and SANBI's own site still lists plant images among its plans. The accession carries no image until the herbarium supplies a scan.
Georeferencing
The coordinate is the centre of a quarter-degree square, not a field fix. BODATSA records the accuracy as 1/4dg and stores the square's code alongside it; a quarter-degree square is about 27 km across. Of the 61 georeferenced Cannabis rows in BODATSA, all 41 flagged 1/4dg fall exactly on a square's centre and none of the other 20 does. The point is carried at the precision the database gives it, with the accuracy stated here. BODATSA's LatLongChecked field is null on every Cannabis row, so no Cannabis coordinate in BODATSA has been verified by the herbarium.
The square is 2930DA.
The square disagrees with the locality. Thorp's sheet, which names the Durban Botanic Gardens in as many words, sits in square 2931CC; this one, whose locality reads In Botanic Gardens., sits in 2930DA, a different square. One of the two is wrong and the catalogue does not say which.
Editorial treatment
The KwaZulu-Natal Herbarium publishes no per-specimen page. Five permalink shapes were tried for a sheet and all answered 404, so the accession cites the database itself and the barcode identifies the sheet.
Medley Wood also gave the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew two cannabis objects from Natal and Zululand, catalogued there in 1888: a fibre sample and a smoking pipe whose label carries the Zulu name Insangu. Those are separate accessions, EBC 43415 among them.
The locality does not name which botanic gardens, but the collector was curator at Durban and the herbarium is Durban's.
Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 07:19, 24 September 2026 (+07)
The Kew pipe is an artefact
The smoking pipe in the note above is not an accession. It is recorded as an artefact, Water pipe (Kew EBC 67634): accessions record cannabis material; the pipe is a made object. The fibre is the accession EBC 43415. The pipe's entry book number is 75.1888 and the fibre's is 7.1888. Both are Kew acquisition numbers: the two objects were entered at Kew in 1888. Kew's catalogue numbers themselves were assigned when the collection was databased in the 1980s. A Zulu mat carrying the pipe's entry number and Medley Wood's name went from Kew to the British Museum in 1960 and is held there as Af1960,20.111. Éloise 20:46, 27 September 2026 (+07)