Botany
What is a “herbarium”?
It is a collection of dried pressed plants fixed by various methods together with labels indicating their collection data on standard size paper sheets. A herbarium ensures the study of plants without limits of time, season or climate, preserving their shape and structure. It is a repository of information about the plant world, which can accommodate thousands of samples in confined spaces, thus differentiating itself from a Botanical Garden. Some plants or parts thereof, such as seeds or fruits, do not lend themselves to compression and drying: These materials are kept dry in jars or in alcohol, to make up collections to complement the herbarium.
Among the samples preserved in a naturalistic collection the most important are the so-called “references”, that is those used to describe for the first time a plant species. In the Florentine herbaria, these reference “models” are already several thousand and are all identified by folders of different colours.