Mudhand

Arundo donax

Arundo donax, not a bamboo but still an impressive grass growing up to 6 meters in height (or sometimes even higher; it is in the same tribe as Phragmites). It is widely naturalized/wwedy in warmer parts of the world, and is common in the Mediterranean and areas with similar climate. It has been [...]

Cupressus torulosa

Today we moved more than 300 boxes of gymnosperms up to the attic, giving us more space for the scanning group down in the Regnellian herberium! We don’t have many gymnosperms scanned (yet), but I found this Cupressus torulosa from the Indian part of Himalaya (it is distributed on limestone also [...]

Moraea vegeta

It was in collaboration with the German (ex-)gardener Carl Ludwig Philipp Zeyher (1799-1858) that Ecklon did most of his collections. Even if we today attribute many of their collections to both of them, they often traveled without each others company. On this specimen we can see two labels… See More, the left in [...]

Lachnaea sociorum

The year 1795 in Åbenrå in what then was Denmark (but today is Schleswig-Holstein), Christian Frederick Ecklon was born. He studied to apothecary, but changed career to botanist and collector, and became one of the most prolific collectors of South African flora, from 1829 together with C.L.P. Zeyher. Here at S we have [...]

Carpinus betulus

This is not a type, but an early collection of avenbok (Carpinus betulus) from Skåne, the southernmost province in Sweden. It is annotaded in the hand of Daniel Solander (1733-1782), both on the front (recto) and the back (verso); of course also professor Johan Emanuel Wikström (1789-1856) has annotated the sheet…

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Penaea dahlgrenii

What’s in a name? Members of family Penaeaceae are a distinct and easily recognised part of the unique South African (Cape) fynbos vegetation. Closely related are the two small and also (southern) African families Oliniaceae and Rhynchocalyx, and they are sometimes lumped into family Penaeaceae. Sister to this group is the South American [...]

Gerrardina eylesiana

Is there anyone who want to go to Africa and have a close look at these plants? Flacourtiaceae is not only merged with Salicaceae (willows), but have also had many genera splitted off. One of these is genus Gerrardina with two species from south-east Africa. Today it is the sole genus in the [...]

Oncoba glauca

Science is an ever evolving pursuit, and family Flacourtiaceae is a good example of this. It was earlier a fairly large tropical and subtropical family, but recent phylogenetic analyses have revealed, i.a., that the temperate family Salicaceae is part of Flacourtiaceae (and these two families should then be united and named Salicaceae), and [...]

Passiflora suberosa

Hendrik van Rijgersma’s (1835-1877) collections from Saint Martin (Lesser Antilles) are always small beauties, here as often accompanied with a water colour drawing. The plant is a Passiflora pallida (a species sometimes included in P. suberosa), one of about 430 Passion flower species in the tropic and warm America (and a further 20 [...]

Lars Levi Laestadius‘ (1800-1861) fame is as the founder of the conservative Lutheran revival movement named after him. But he was also a skilled botanist, and only 24 years old he collected and described this plant as a new variety (later rised to species of its own) of “Arundo lapponica” from Tåsjöberget in Ångermanland, northern [...]