As the group of tired botanists and horticulturalists drove along the dirt road in Victoria’s high country, they were almost ready to give up.
These scientists from Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens had been driving along the track near Swift’s Creek all morning, scanning native vegetation on the roadside.
Their quarry was the (rather accurately named) elusive cress, or Irenepharsus magicus, a rare herb-like plant that grows up to a metre tall and has elongated sprays of small, white, four-petalled flowers. They wanted to find a specimen to harvest its seeds.
“We had that moment of despair, thinking it’s no longer here,” says Andre Messina, a Royal Botanic Gardens botanist. “Then one of the horticulturalists looked at the other side of the road in this weedy, messy patch full of blackberries and said, ‘Is that it down there?’ And it was.”
This week, that hard-won Irenepharsus magicus specimen became the millionth plant specimen added to the Royal Botanic Gardens’ National Herbarium of Victoria.
A herbarium is a plant museum, and the yellow building in the botanic gardens, tucked away next to the children’s garden, is a trove of unusual flora.
Database officer Rita Macheda and botanist Andre Messina with the millionth specimen to be catalogued at the herbarium.Credit:Eddie Jim
Inside hundreds of metal lockers that house the specimens, there are original watercolours drawn by 17th-century botanists, specimens of plants that are now extinct, and those collected in countries or areas that no longer exist because of war or human intervention, such as dams.
They include a rare specimen of red algae, Amphiroa exilis, which was hand-collected by Charles Darwin in Brazil on the voyage of the Beagle.
When the Victorian herbarium was established in 1853 its founder Ferdinand von Mueller said it would be “at all times” accessible to the public. But the logistics of caring for such a fragile collection made this impossible.
Now the immense cataloguing effort means digitised specimen information – and, increasingly, high-resolution images of the specimens – are available online for researchers, artists and students around the world.
The dried branch, stem or flower of a plant is pressed onto a sheet of paper, while fungi, lichen and other materials are kept in boxes.
“Herbarium specimens are like botanical time capsules,” says David Cantrill, the executive director of science at the Royal Botanic Gardens. “They provide a permanent record of the occurrence of a species at a particular place and time.”
This means scientists can establish species distribution, botanical diversity and the relationships between species, and predict how different species might respond to environmental change.
Rita Macheda (right) and colleague Catherine Gallagher cataloguing specimens in 2016.Credit:Jason South
Database officer Rita Macheda has been cataloguing flora at the herbarium for more than 20 years and reached her 100,000th specimen last week, meaning she has created about 10 per cent of the entire database.
Visitors to the botanic gardens often walk past the herbarium and assume the garden is growing herbs. Ms Macheda hopes its role can be better understood.
“Our work ties into history broadly and talks about people travelling abroad to collect specimens,” she says. “It shows how important science was historically and how flora played a picture.”
Detective work is required to establish the provenance of a specimen, including translation of old handwritten letters and liaising with the network of herbaria around the world.
The Victorian herbarium has a seed bank, which is associated with the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens in London. This project aims to store seeds from some of the world’s most threatened plants.
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