Founded in 1711, Trinity’s School of Botany is one of the smallest schools of the university, holding only 12 academic positions. Despite its small size, most students at Trinity will be familiar with the botany building, located at the east end of the rugby pitch, with its quaint curved edge and enchanting entryway adorned with crawling leafy plants. Housed inside this storybook building is the herbarium, containing a myriad of dried plant samples dating back over 400 years — one of Trinity’s many hidden gems.
Being one of only two herbaria in Ireland (the other being part of the National Botanical Garden in Glasnevin), the collection holds almost half a million specimens of plant, including not only flowering plants but also mosses, ferns, liverworts (small flowerless green plants), and fungi from all over the globe. The largest collections of such specimens were obtained in Europe, South Africa, Australia, and the Americas, though all regions of the world, including Antarctica, are represented. However, this was not always the case. The collection had humble beginnings in the eighteenth century with a donation from Sir Hans Sloane of a thick folio of plant specimens obtained mainly from his own home garden, deemed unimportant at the time. There were further notable donations in the proceeding years as the collection began to grow, including specimens collected during the voyages of Captain James Cook to Australia. Notably, the herbarium holds samples from the explorations of Sir Charles Darwin, which were obtained by William Henry Harvey, curator of the collection from 1844–1866 and close personal friend of Darwin himself.
“Trinity’s herbarium contains the largest collection of algae in Ireland, and one of the largest in any university herbarium anywhere in the world”
The botany building that we know today was opened in 1907, with the herbarium in its current form being a later extension. Previously, its vast collection experienced many moves around the 47 acre campus, including a brief stay in house five, the current department of music. Today, Trinity’s herbarium contains the largest collection of algae (a large group of aquatic, photosynthesising organisms) in Ireland, and one of the largest in any university herbarium anywhere in the world. The herbarium also contains an extensive non-lending library of ecological literature that is entirely separate from Trinity’s seven-million-book library collection.
“The importance of the herbarium cannot be understated”
The herbarium acts as a reference collection of plants to researchers across a variety of disciplines including conservation, urban ecology, mycology (study of fungi) and even paleoecology (the study of ancient organisms). It also acts as the only plant taxonomic teaching and research resource in Ireland. The importance of the herbarium cannot be understated as it acts as an invaluable catalogue of type material (examples of plant types) allowing for accurate identification of exotic plants. Its specimens are of course also essential to the baseline study of Irish vegetation and flora — representing the dazzling contribution Irish researchers have made and continue to make to the exploration of our natural world. Presently, researchers at the herbarium are involved in a multitude of botanical cataloguing projects, most notably the latest edition of the Flora of Ireland, a complete catalogue of the plantlife of Ireland, as well as the Flora of Thailand and the World Flora Online, an online log of all known plants.
“Until then, this magnificent herbarium is open to all staff and students of Trinity”
The herbarium has also undertaken several significant imaging processes over a number of decades in an effort to digitise the collection for online viewing. These efforts aim to make the University’s collection more accessible to the public as well as to repatriate data of plants originating all around the world. However, at present plant data and images are not available online save for a small number of legacy images of plants of particular historical significance. In 2023, under Curator Peter Moonlight, the herbarium received over €1.5 million from the National Parks and Wildlife Service for a project titled Transforming Trinity’s Herbarium, which will allow the herbarium to significantly increase capacity for its ever-growing collection, as well as to aid in the digitisation of the entire plant database. This project is to run until 2037 with the new herbarium database website set to be online in the early months of 2025. Until then, this magnificent herbarium is open to all staff and students of Trinity, with the botany society (TCD BotSoc) hosting regular plant identification study groups inside the botanical library itself.
