**Sold Out**Te Papa Botany Curator Leon Perrie will introduce the herbarium collection, showcase its highlights, and discuss how it is used.
See plants collected during Cook’s first Pacific voyage, engravings from Joseph Banks’ Florilegium, and other treasures!
The Botany Collection comprises some 350,000 dried plant specimens, with about 1500 added annually. It is one of Te Papa’s biggest collections and is a major underpinning of botanical research in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is supported by an active volunteer programme.
Leon Perrie‘s research focuses on New Zealand’s ferns: their numbers, locations and identification. He has used DNA analyses to address this work and such questions as how ferns are related to one another and to species overseas. He was a contributing author for the Ferns and Lycophytes series for the online Flora of New Zealand. He also works on Pacific ferns, and has studied other plant groups, particularly Pseudopanax (lancewoods and five fingers).
Dr Carlos Lehnebach studies the diversity, evolution and conservation of New Zealand flowering plants. His main groups of interest are terrestrial and epiphytic orchids, alpine plants, and plants shared with other land masses in the Southern Hemisphere.
Image credit: Print of Rhabdothamnus solandri based on drawings by Endeavour artist Sydney Parkinson.