Inside the Kew Herbarium
I'm standing in the centre of the herbarium at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, surrounded by grand Victorian architecture. Three-storey staircases spiral beside tall columns of iron, and vast wooden cupboards handcrafted and heavily-set file in rows like lockers in an old schoolhouse.
A remarkably precious artefact, extracted from one of these cupboards, lies on a large oak table in front of me. It is a solanum flower a wild tomato pressed, dried and mounted on paper, collected during Charles Darwin's early 19th century expedition to the Galapagos Islands. The cutting shows every bit its age, all moisture long departed from its browned and brittle stems. However, new annotations decorate the paper mounting. There are catalogue numbers, location notes and sticker- printed barcodes: indications of historical but also ongoing use. As with the seven million other specimens stored in the cupboards of Kew's herbarium, this is not a museum piece; it is a resource with which fundamental questions of plant identity, diversity, conservation and usefulness continue to be answered.
Nina Davies, Senior Curator-Botanist at the herbarium, is showing me round its five wings and two cavernous basements. We've begun in Wing C, the first extension to be added to Hunter House, where the collections began. Hunter House faces Kew Green in front and a sweep of the Thames behind, an 18th Century, Baroque-style house occupied by Kew since 1851. “ Botanist Sir William Hooker was director of the gardens at that time,” Davies tells me, “ and initially the ground floor of Hunter House accommodated his own personal herbaria.” With new specimens flooding in from all across the British Empire, however, and eminent botanists soon donating their own collections to Kew, expansion became imperative.
