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Introduction

George Watt (1851–1930). His herbarium sheets are signed G. Watt, the label form by which a biography claims the specimens it collected.

People and organisations covers those who collected, documented, published or conserved the material this wiki records. A herbarium sheet names its collector, a report names its author and a seed accession names whoever gathered it. Most of those names have no article yet.

The people are collectors and botanists, revenue officers and physicians, the authors of the sources and the compilers of the gazetteers. The organisations are the herbaria and botanic gardens holding the specimens, the seed companies and collectives circulating living material and the government bodies whose enquiries produced much of the documentary record.

Biographies here are written from published sources. Each states what a person collected, where and when they worked and how their work is cited. Where a colonial official's own language shapes the record it is quoted and attributed rather than adopted.

Featured biography

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ACE Seeds is a cannabis seed vendor based in Spain that sells seed of pure and stabilised cannabis varieties, together with hybrids bred from them. It describes itself as a collective of cannabis breeders dedicated to the preservation and study of the plant, and its site header calls it a cannabis breeding and preservation association. The site states that ACE Seeds has been offering its genetics since 2005.

Its catalogue is divided into a Pure and stabilized section and sections for hybrids, feminised lines, limited editions, CBD-rich lines and autoflowering lines. The pure and stabilised section is the documentary basis for the accessions catalogued below, each of which names ACE Seeds as its seed storage location. read more →

Did you know...

From the biographies

...that 588 accessions on this wiki name a collector, but only two of those collectors, George Watt and Walter Norman Koelz, have an article yet?
...that a biography claims its specimens through the name written on the sheet rather than the name on the page, so George Watt is linked to his collections by the label form G. Watt and Walter Norman Koelz by W. N. Koelz?
...that the two official enquiries into Bengal ganja were written by Hem Chunder Kerr, an Indian officer of the Government of Bengal, in 1877, and by David Prain, a Scottish botanist of the Indian Medical Service, in 1893?
...that Hem Chunder Kerr had already compiled an official report on jute, in 1874, before he was set to work on ganja?
...that Walter Norman Koelz collected plants, birds and ethnographic material across South Asia and Iran over twenty-three years, from 1930 to 1953?
...that George Watt was a physician by training, and compiled A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India between 1885 and 1893 while in the service of the Government of India?

Selected picture

In the field

Walter Norman Koelz in Lahul, in the western Himalaya, during the collecting years that produced his Indian herbarium series

Who is here

By what they did

Collectors: George Watt · Walter Norman Koelz
Botanists: George Watt · Walter Norman Koelz · David Prain
Authors & administrators: Hem Chunder Kerr · David Prain
Seed companies: The Real Seed Company · ACE Seeds · Coco Genes · Afropips · Delicorganic
Collectives: Vibes Collective · Zomia Collective
Wanted: the herbaria: The institutions holding the specimens have no pages yet, among them the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, the Forest Herbarium of Thailand and Kew
Wanted: the authors: Lewis Sydney Steward O'Malley · Willem Boorsma · Georg Eberhard Rumphius · Pieter Johannes Veth · William Marsden · Peter Kolb · Garcia da Orta

Things you can do

Contribute

Help identify the people behind the record

Write a collector: more than ninety collectors are named across the accessions and nearly all are redlinks. Start with those holding the most material
Record the label form: a new biography only claims its specimens once collector_name carries the name as the sheet writes it
Title with the full name: George Watt, not G. Watt. Initials and label forms become redirects to the article
Write the institutions: the herbaria, botanic gardens and surveys that hold this material have no pages at all
Fill the source authors: the names on the title pages in Sources are mostly still redlinks
Source living people carefully: only what has been published and bears on the record. No addresses, no coordinates and nothing a seller has not made public themselves

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