The Malvaceae Pages:
The Digital Herbarium
back to Malvaceae Info (home)
INTRODUCTION
A herbarium stores dried and pressed plant specimens for reference by
botanists. This "digital herbarium" is intended to take advantage of
newer Internet and digital photography technologies to provide an analogous
online facility.
FORMAT
Each page will provide information under some of the following headings.
- Distribution: where the plant is native or naturalised.
- Habitat: the environment in which it grows naturally.
- Identification: suggestions for characters which can be used to
identify the plant in the field.
- Source: where the plant came from (or was observed, if the
description was taken from plants in situ in the wild or in a garden
open to the public).
- Technical Description: a description of the plant in botanical
jargon, for the benefit of botanists; other readers are advised to ignore this
and refer to the illustrated vernacular description following. Material taken
from published descriptions and not confirmed by personal observation will be
shown in italics; material taken from descriptions of the genus and not
confirmed by personal observation will additionally be shown in
grey.
- Description: a description of the plant, with photograph
illustrations, in more vernacular language. (I'll try to limit the use of
jargon here, but in many cases there's no colloquial English term for
particular plant parts.)
- Cultivation: cultivation notes, including propagation techniques.
- Pests and Diseases: information on pests and diseases affecting the
taxon.
- Cytology: information on the cytology of the taxon; usually reported
chromosome counts.
- Variation: a herbarium sheet gives a misleading impression of a
taxon, in that it is a record of one individual, and may display characters in
which it is atypical, or which are not uniform within the taxon. This section
describes known variation in the taxon.
- Taxonomy: discussion of the taxonomy of the taxon.
- Synonymy: a list of the synonyms of the taxon.
- Hybrids: notes on known hybrids involving the taxon.
- Hazards: health risks associated with the taxon.
- References: sources I have used for information given the Digital
Herbarium sheet.
- Bibliography: written materials covering the taxon; I may not have
seen all items listed here.
- Photographs: links to other photographs of the taxon elsewhere on
the World Wide Web.
- Acknowledgements and Copyright
TAXA
The plants currently in The Digital Herbarium
"IN PREPARATION"
The "Index
Malvacearum" lists those malvaceous plants that I am currently
growing, and which therefore are candidates for inclusion within this Digital
Herbarium.
CONTRIBUTE