The mycological collection of the National Museum

The mycological department of the National Museum in Prague has been independent since 1965, when it took over collections previously kept in the botanical department. The collection now runs to about five hundred thousand items, which the museum itself describes as among the largest on a European and world scale.

The contents are broader than the word herbarium suggests. There are herbarium specimens of fungi and lichens, fluid preparations, fruit bodies from the specimen collection, paintings and photographs of fungi, and mycological publications and archives. The last two categories are often treated as an appendix in collections, although without them there is no way to reconstruct who assigned a name, when, and on what basis.

The work of the department is building the collections, taxonomic research on fungi and lichens, and popularisation. Material circulates: roughly thirty consignments of herbarium material leave the museum each year for specialists at universities, museums and research institutes. The section is headed by Mgr František Bouda, contactable at frantisek.bouda@nm.cz and on 224 497 853.

And here is the thing worth knowing before a visit. The museum states plainly that it does not run a public mushroom identification service — it gives lack of time as the main reason and refers enquirers elsewhere. In Prague the public mushroom advice desk is run by the Czech Mycological Society, on Karmelitská street in Malá Strana. The division of roles is therefore legible: the state institution looks after the evidence, the learned society talks to the pickers.

Since 2011 the collections have been kept in a new repository at Cirkusová 1740, 190 00 Prague 9 – Horní Počernice, rather than in the historic building on Wenceslas Square. That building instead holds a permanent exhibition on the world of fungi, lichens and plants.

Half a million items and an archive of the discipline

The National Museum's Prague mycological collections contain about 500,000 units. They include dried vouchers, fluid material, models, images and archives, including the legacy of August Carl Joseph Corda. Collection strategy documents identify more than 6,000 nomenclatural types. That is a total of name-bearing references, not “6,000 most important species”: a type anchors how a name is applied. Labels, correspondence and illustrations together reveal changes in identification and Central European mycological practice. The collection serves research and access must be arranged; public galleries show only a selected fraction. It is not a food-safety advisory desk or an on-demand service for clearing private finds as edible.