The fungarium at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

The herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh holds more than three million specimens and grows by roughly thirty thousand a year. Fungi form a distinct part of it: one hundred and fifty-two thousand specimens, of which three thousand one hundred and ninety-six are types, the material to which a species name is formally attached. The reach is global, but the weight of the collection sits on material from the British Isles.

The history of the holdings reads like an index to a mycology textbook. There are specimens from Archibald Menzies and from Johann Friedrich Klotzsch, who worked as a mycologist in Glasgow. There is material from Robert Kaye Greville, on which his Scottish Cryptogamic Flora rested. There are classical specimens from Elias Magnus Fries and duplicates from Miles Joseph Berkeley and Mordecai Cubitt Cooke — three men without whom fungal nomenclature would look different today.

Later acquisitions show how interests shifted. Malcolm Wilson left specimens of plant and tree pathogens, P. D. Orton the agaric collections that underpinned his publications, and Edred John Henry Corner about two thousand specimens. Scottish material was added by Douglas M. Henderson and Roy Watling. Current research at the institution concentrates on lichenised fungi and on the rusts of the order Pucciniales, economically troublesome parasites of agricultural, horticultural and forest plants.

The collection is largely offline. Eighteen per cent of the fungal specimens have a database record and two per cent have an image. Anyone who wants to see the rest has to travel.

The herbarium is open Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 17:00, and the institution notes that other times can be arranged for visiting researchers. A visit is requested through a form — one for vascular plants, another for cryptogams, which is where fungi belong — sent to herbarium@rbge.org.uk. This is not a display you drop into on the way past. It is a working room you make an appointment with.

How much of the collection is actually digital

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh reports about 152,000 fungal specimens, including 3,196 types. Its collection profile also says that roughly 18% of the material has a database record and about 2% an image. This usefully separates “held,” “catalogued” and “photographed”: failure to find an online result is not evidence that no voucher exists. Strengths include Scottish fungi, lichens and material from botanical expeditions. The fungarium is part of a research herbarium; visits require advance arrangement, while loans or sampling requests follow collection policy. The date of the profile should be checked before quoting digital coverage because continuing digitisation changes these proportions.