Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
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| Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh | |
|---|---|
| |
| Type | Botanic garden and herbarium |
| Website | rbge.org.uk |
| Founded | 1670 |
| Base | Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Scope | International |
| Focus | Living and preserved plant collections, plant science and conservation |
| Other sites | Herbarium catalogue |
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) is a botanic garden and plant-science institution in Edinburgh, Scotland. It began in 1670 as a physic garden growing medicinal plants.[1] Its herbarium, registered in Index Herbariorum under the code E, holds around three million specimens.[2][3] The herbarium catalogue lists 190 sheets of Cannabis, among them sheets gathered in India in the 19th century by George Watt, John Henry Lace and other collectors.[4]
Status and governance
Andrew Balfour and Robert Sibbald established the physic garden near the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and it received a royal warrant in 1699.[1] The National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1985 created a Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. The Act charges the Board with maintaining collections of living plants, preserved plant material, books and archives, and with keeping them as national reference collections available for study.[5][6] RBGE describes itself as a non-departmental public body, sponsored and funded through grant-in-aid by the Scottish Government, a registered charity and an academic institution. A Regius Keeper leads it.[7]
The herbarium
The herbarium grew from those of the University of Edinburgh and the Botanical Society of Edinburgh. The two were combined in 1839–40. The foreign collections moved to the garden in 1863, and the University's herbarium was formally transferred to it in 1872.[8] RBGE gives its present holdings as around three million specimens of plants, fungi, lichens and diatoms, from more than 14,000 collectors.[3][9] The herbarium and library building opened in 1964 and was extended in 1997 and 2006.[10]
South Asian collections
The herbarium's Indian material includes several large collections. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton left his own set of specimens and his catalogue to the University of Edinburgh.[11] The herbarium holds about 23,000 specimens collected in southern India between 1820 and 1853 by Robert Wight and the Indian collectors who worked for him.[12] It also has more than one set of William Roxburgh's South Indian specimens.[13] George Watt's personal herbarium, about 20,000 collections, was donated to the garden. So was John Henry Lace's own complete collection; another, nearly complete set of his went to Kew.[14][15] Henry Noltie, writing on the garden's blog, states that the early collections sent to John Hope or to the University were re-curated in the mid-19th century. Many specimens were lost then, along with information about those that were kept.[16]
The Himalayan material includes a set of the collections Frank Ludlow and George Sherriff made in Bhutan and south-eastern Tibet between 1933 and 1949, and duplicate sets of collections made in Nepal by Adam Stainton and others from 1954.[13]
Cannabis specimens
The herbarium catalogue lists 190 sheets under the genus Cannabis.[4] GBIF, which republishes the catalogue, files 40 of them under India, 29 under the United Kingdom, 11 under Bhutan, seven under Nepal and five under Afghanistan, and gives no country for 83. Most are named Cannabis sativa. A few carry Cannabis indica, a variety or subspecies indica, or Cannabis ruderalis.[17]
The 19th-century Indian sheets include gatherings by Watt, Lace, Wight and Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn, and by Andrew Fleming, William Jameson and Walter Elliot around the middle of the century.[17] Later material includes a sheet collected on 19 August 1970 by Peter Hadland Davis between Ketama and Tleta Ketama in Morocco, recorded as a field crop.[18] It also includes a sheet from the Darchula 2012 expedition to far-western Nepal, collected on 9 July 2012 from male plants 30 to 50 cm tall.[19]
Catalogue and images
The online herbarium catalogue gives each sheet a stable address built from its barcode, such as https://data.rbge.org.uk/herb/E00248604. Sheet images are served through a IIIF image service.[20][21] RBGE states the licence for its images in three ways. The catalogue gives CC0 1.0 for data and CC BY 4.0 for images. The garden's digitisation page says that all specimen images and data carry a CC0 licence. The image service's manifests name CC BY-SA 2.5.[20][22][21] GBIF publishes the specimen data under CC0 1.0.[23]
Accessions
Accessions held at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Our history". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: Herbarium (E)". Index Herbariorum. New York Botanical Garden. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Our Collections". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Herbarium catalogue: genus Cannabis". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1985, section 10: Establishment of Board of Trustees". legislation.gov.uk. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1985, section 11: The Board's general functions". legislation.gov.uk. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Who we are". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Integrated Herbaria". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Collectors". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Building History". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ Noltie, Henry (29 November 2018). "Francis Buchanan's Bengal Survey botanical drawings and specimens reunited after 203 years". Botanics Stories. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Introduction to the data base of botanical drawings for Robert Wight". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Angiosperms". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ Elliott, Alan (9 June 2014). "Sir George Watt (1851-1930)". Botanics Stories. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Lace, John Henry". RBGE Archive. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ Noltie, Henry (12 October 2017). "William Roxburgh's herbarium specimens at RBGE and rediscovery of Patrick Russell's herbarium". Botanics Stories. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 "Occurrence search: Cannabis at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh". GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cannabis L., specimen E00669323". Herbarium catalogue. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cannabis sativa L., specimen E01623297". Herbarium catalogue. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 "Herbarium catalogue". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 "IIIF manifest, specimen E00248604". RBGE IIIF image service. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Digitisation". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Edinburgh (E) Herbarium Specimens". GBIF. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. doi:10.15468/ypoair. Retrieved 4 October 2026.