Botany Collection
Sean Haughian
Botany Curator
The botany collection for the Nova Scotia Museum is housed in an herbarium. This is a collection of preserved plant specimens, either whole or parts. We house approximately 50,000 individual specimens of vascular plants, mosses, mushrooms, seaweeds and lichens. Some of our collections are seeds, cones, wood, bark or commercial products of plant parts. The earliest collection is of a skeletonized poplar leaf, collected in 1847 in Hants Co. Each collection provides an object collected from a certain place in a certain time by an individual. There are standards to providing specimens for the collection so that researchers may use the objects to identify other individuals, a lesson we took from Linnaeus as indicated in his quote!
We have about 12,000 images of a botanical nature including habitat pictures, images of models and living plant portraits.
A practical botanist will distinguish at the first glance the plant of the different quarters of the globe and yet will be at a loss to tell by what marks he detects them.
Carolus von Linnaeus