What Local Native Plant Is That?
In Bushland Near Your SchoolWhat Is It
An herbarium (plural herbaria) is a collection of dried plants that have been labelled and carefully protected and preserved as a record for further study.
You will find them at universities, museums, botanic gardens and in private collections all overthe world. They form an important record of where plants are found. Some are several hundred years old and very valuable.
Buildings where these collections are kept are also called Herbaria.
The Queensland Herbarium, at the Mt. Cootha Botanic Gardens in Brisbane, is part of the Environmental Protection Agency (a state government department), and is the centre for information and research on Queensland plants and plant communities.
There is an Herbarium in every state, plus a National Herbarium in Canberra
Plant specimens collected by explorers are very precious. They are sent back to botanical experts,carefully labelled and put into herbaria to provide information about the place that was explored.
As time passes and our scientific knowledge increases, these collections become even more valuable as we are able to extract more information.
Your herbarium will go into the school library as a record of the local native plants growing near your school. If your class is the first to make a collection you will have the easy job with the most common plants. But you will also have the most important job of BEGINNING the project. You will have the task of setting out how the plants should be put into the folder and how the written information should be displayed.
Another class can see what you have done and add some more plants to your school's collection.
If every school had its own herbarium, you would find that each one would be a little bit different because the plants vary from place to place.
What happened to the plant specimens collected from Australia by early Europen explorers?
Did astronauts bring plant specimens back from the moon?
Why do plants grow in different places?
Turn your herbarium into an herbariumPLUS.
Web Links
Atherton Herbarium Fact Sheet, 2004. (PDF 881 kb)
Australian National Herbarium, Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research
Queensland Herbarium, Queensland Environmental Protection Agency
