The largest collection of plant specimens in Taiwan, the Taipei Botanical Garden’s herbarium, is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition that opened on Friday.
The herbarium provides critical historical documents for botanists and is the first of its kind in Taiwan, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute director Tseng Yen-hsueh (曾彥學) said.
It is housed in a two-story red brick building, which opened during 1924.
Taipei Times
At the time, it stored 30,000 plant specimens from almost 6,000 species, including Taiwanese plant samples collected by Tomitaro Makino, the “father of Japanese botany,” Tseng said.
The herbarium collection has grown in the century since its founding, because of the efforts of researchers such as Cheng Tsung-yuan (鄭宗元), Lu Chin-ming (呂錦明), Chang Hui-chu (張惠珠), Yang Yuan-po (楊遠波) and Chiu Wen-liang (邱文良), Tseng added.
The herbarium holds more than 560,000 specimens of all shapes and sizes, more than can be fit into the two-story building, so most have been moved to a different research facility, and all have been digitized for online visitors, he said.
The specimens offer modern botanists insights into the historical context and environment in which they were discovered. For example, the herbarium is home to plants such as the Wulai azalea (Rhododendron kanehirai), which was endemic to Taiwan, but is now extinct in the wild.
The herbarium is a must-visit for aspiring botanists in Taiwan, serves as a central hub for research and is an essential resource for plant taxonomy, Chiu said.
Aside from publications of Taiwanese botany, the exhibition is to run until the end of the year and would showcase atlases published in the past century, from the Japanese colonial period to the present.
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