Recreating a long-lost herbarium

The Horticultural Society of London (now the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS)) sold its herbarium collection at auction in 1856. The collection was made up of specimens collected by its sponsored plant collectors in addition to a number of donated collections. This paper attempts to recreate the lost herbarium virtually by tracking down the current location of the RHS’s set of specimens via the sales catalogue. The RHS’s Lindley Library still holds many of the journals made by the collectors, along with accessions registers for many of the plants that made their way into our gardens. As these become digitised and available to researchers via the RHS’s web portal it should soon be possible to enhance the notes, dates of collection and geographic localities that are sadly lacking on the actual specimens.