Guide to the plant species descriptions published in seed lists from Botanic Gardens for the period  1800 - 1900.
By:  Cees W.J. Lut  (formerly Chief Librarian National Herbarium of the Netherlands)
 (in cooperation with J.F.Veldkamp)

                                                                                                                                    This website is designed for a 1280 x 1024 resolution.

                                                                                                                                
                                                                                                            Search description            Seed lists: available/missing


 Welcome to this electronic and interactive guide to descriptions of new plants species published in seed lists. Please note that this guide represents work in progress and that the present version is as yet incomplete.

Botanical Gardens for a long time have produced annual seed lists for exchange. In some European ones of the 19th century it was customary to include diagnoses, descriptions, and notes either in footnotes or in appendices. These lists were printed in a very limited edition and past issues generally were not kept. None of the old and large libraries in the world has a complete set of them, and the collections that they do have usually are incomplete. Smaller or more recent libraries probably have none at all. The Library of the NCB (Netherlands Centre of Biodiversity - Naturalis: section National Herbarium of the Netherlands) in Leiden has a large collection of seed lists, but it, too, is far from complete. Collaboration with other libraries and taxonomists was essential.

I am therefore very grateful to  Folmer Arnklit, Botanical Garden, University of Copenhagen (Denmark), Arthur Chapman, Toowoomba South (Australia),  Gianniantonio Domina, Herbarium Mediterraneum Panormitanum, Palermo (Italy), Brian Doggett, Worth School, Turner's Hill (UK), Stephan Dressler, Research Institute Senckenberg, Frankfurt am Main (Germany),  Michael Kiehn, Dept. of Biogeography and Botanical Garden, Vienna (Austria), Toomas Kukk, Tartu (Estonia),  Manuela De Matteis Tortora,  Orto Botanico di Napoli (Italy),  Magdalena Murlarczyk, Wroclaw University Botanical Garden (Poland),  and to the Institute of Botany - University of Vienna (Austria),  Life Sciences Library (Botany Section), University of Liege (Belgium), National Botanic Garden of Belgium, Meise (Belgium), Tallinn Botanic Garden, Tallinn (Estonia), Institut National d'Horticulture, Angers (France), Museum d'Histoire Naturelle - Ville de Grenoble (France), Botanischen Garten und Botanischen Museum, Berlin-Dahlem (Germany), Bücherei des Deutschen Gartenbaues e.V., Berlin (Germany), Institut für Allgemeine Botanik, Hamburg (Germany), Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest (Hungary), Biblioteca dell'Orto Botanico, Padova (Italy), Nationaal Herbarium Nederland (Utrecht University branch) (the Netherlands), Komarov Botanical Library, St.Petersburg (Russia), Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (Scotland/UK), Conservatoire & Jardin botaniques de la Ville de Genève, Chambésy/Genève (Switzerland), The Linnean Society of London, London (UK), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK),  Harvard University Botany Libraries, Cambridge (U.S.A.) Missouri Botanical Garden, St.Louis (U.S.A.), for providing me with copies of seed lists in their libraries.

In some cases the information was republished in contemporary scientific journals (e.g. in * examples) and so became available to the general public. From these secondary sources the names of  about 5000 new genera and species have been included in the Index Kewensis. Infrageneric and infraspecific names are not included there at all. How many names this website will count is presently of course impossible to estimate, but we expect more than 4700. Obviously, I like to go for all, but locating all lists will be impossible. I hope to finish this project June 2013. Errors and omissions found in the Index Kewensis (and IPNI) will be sent to IPNI.

The current project aims to make available, the original descriptions in a searchable database, with the title page of the seed list and its date of publication or an estimate thereof.

I feel that such a guide would fill a gap and be of great use in places where botanical nomenclature and the history of horticulture are being studied.

Cees Lut 
                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                                                                            Search description       Seed lists: available/missing