One Wing of Kew's Herbarium
Herbarium Cupboard
Type Specimens in Red Folders
Material
Awaiting Distribution
Storing 7 million objects and being able to find them again easily poses some organisational challenges. Fortunately, the classification of plant species into genera and the grouping of these genera into families facilitates organisation of the collection.
Specimens at Kew are arranged by plant family (using a scheme devised originally by George Bentham and Joseph Hooker) and then by genus. Thus all the plants belonging to one plant family will be in adjacent cupboards in the same part of the Herbarium building. Over a thousand cupboards are used to house the collection for plants of just one family, the pea-family or Leguminosae. Within a family the specimens are then arranged according to the geographical area they were collected from. So all the African specimens of a given genus will be in the same cupboard(s). Wherever possible, we organize the species 'systematically' (with related plants being stored in adjacent cupboards) using the most recently published monograph of that group of plants.
This arrangement has the great merit that closely related plants from the same area are all found close to one another for easy comparison. Specimens that have yet to be identified - possibly because they are new species and thus in a sense unidentifiable - are stored separately awaiting review by a specialist in that genus.