The herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden

The herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden holds four million items, the oldest of them a specimen from 1724. The collection covers every group that traditionally found its way into a botanical herbarium: algae and diatoms, slime moulds and fungi, mosses, lichens and ferns, gymnosperms and flowering plants. Material comes from all over the world, but the weight of the collecting falls on south-western Europe and tropical Africa. For Central Africa this collection is the world reference.

That last sentence explains why mycology at Meise looks unlike mycology at most European institutions. The garden has a long research tradition in African fungal diversity, and within it a focus on ectomycorrhizal taxa — Boletales, Cantharellales and Amanitaceae. Alongside them sits work on saprotrophs from the Agaricales, Polyporales and Hymenochaetales, and on parasitic and plant-pathogenic fungi, including the insect-associated Laboulbeniales. The garden mycologists include Mario Amalfi and André De Kesel.

The herbarium can be visited in person, and it can also be worked on in its digital form. For a visiting researcher the procedure is set out step by step: first read the visitor policy, then complete the visitor form before arrival, then report to reception on the day to sign the register and collect a visitor pass. Only then is the scientific manager of the collection informed. The institution also keeps guest rooms, requested through the same form.

The hours are broad and office-like: Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 16:30, with the option of starting earlier or staying later by arrangement. Loans go only to institutions listed in Index Herbariorum, so a private person will not receive a specimen in the post. Contact runs through the curator, at curator@plantentuinmeise.be.

Provenance is part of the data

Meise Botanic Garden holds about four million specimens, more than three million of them digitally recorded. Its fungal profile is notable for material from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi—the institution estimates it preserves about 85% of all collections from that region. This concentration is both a scientific resource and a trace of Belgian colonial history. Labels, collectors, expedition routes and conditions of acquisition are therefore interpretive evidence, not clerical extras. The garden and public glasshouses are ticketed visitor spaces, while the herbarium is research infrastructure requiring separate arrangements. A digital record may expose a label or image, but it does not remove the need to reassess an old identification and its collecting context.