The Hidden Beauty of Seeds & Fruits displays the historic carpology collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh.
Photographer Levon Biss painstakingly examined over 3,500 historical specimens to select just 121 for inclusion, highlighting those with the most striking evolutionary adaptations and stories. Many of the specimens date back to the early 19th Century and were collected by the pioneering botanists of their time, including those on the Challenger Expedition in 1872.
The images presented by Levon allow the audience to appreciate and study these tiny specimens in levels of detail normally only available with the use of microscopes. Using his photo stacking techniques and bespoke camera system, Levon is able to capture unprecedented levels of detail from specimens far too small to view with the naked eye providing us with an insight into an unseen world.
Throughout its long history, scientists have used the RBGE herbarium collection to help them interpret the diversity of plants and fungi. Crops, poisonous plants, garden plants, medicinal plants, tiny herbs, giant rain-forest trees – all kinds of plants and fungi are represented. Herbaria such as the RBGE act as ‘libraries’ of plant material and are crucial in helping us to determine which plants grow where and how we can differentiate them.
Now, faced with the twin challenges of climate change and the biodiversity crisis, researchers are using herbarium specimens in new ways to understand and address these threats to our planet. For example, old herbarium specimens, from Scotland which pre-date the Industrial Revolution provide a ‘snapshot’ of the environment before human activities started to have a major impact on it. Plants absorb pollutants from air and water, and these can remain in the dried specimens. Therefore, by analysing herbarium specimens, we can track rises and falls in levels of pollutants from a time when they were hardly produced. To give another example, by examining herbarium records of the time of first flowering over 200 years, we can track plants’ response to changing global temperatures. We can also use herbarium records to track plant migrations, and use the information to predict how plants will respond to climate change in the future.
Information from herbarium specimens is used to help determine the conservation status of plant species, which are included in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. This is an essential source of information on the extinction risk of individual plant, animal and fungus species, and as such, informs global efforts to conserve biodiversity. Based on comprehensive assessments of wild populations, thousands of plants have been assigned to categories such as Vulnerable or Endangered, and in the worst cases, Extinct.
Most herbarium specimens have been pressed flat and affixed to a standard-sized piece of card called a herbarium sheet. Once the specimen has been prepared, the sheet is placed in a folder. Multiple folders are then stored flat on shelves in specially designed cupboards. Some specimens, however, are too bulky to fit on a herbarium sheet; instead, they are stored in boxes and bags of different sizes. Together, these specimens are called the carpological collection, because they consist almost entirely of fruit and seeds.
David Harris, Herbarium Curator
Visitors to the herbarium are usually taxonomists from around the world who examine our plant specimens to further their research. They are interested in the morphological characters, which are the features they can examine, to determine identification of the correct scientific name. They also scrutinise the label information to record the date on which the specimen was collected and the specific location where it was found.
The extraordinarily detailed images captured by Levon display a varied range of surface details, and we are given a tantalising glimpse of seeds still nestled in their fruits. Some of the images show the mechanisms plants use to achieve seed dispersal, displaying papery wings and other lightweight structures that aid flight. Others show the remnants of pulpy material that would have attracted birds and mammals to the fruit, later depositing the seeds far away from the parent plant and thus giving them a fighting chance of germination and survival. We can also see where seeds have been attached and the scars that remain.
The species represented here reflect over one hundred years of botanical collecting and span the globe - from Chile to Congo, from Kuwait to Indonesia – and include species from areas of the world where our scientists are currently carrying out fieldwork and collaborating fully with local botanical organisations. They also showcase the RBGE cultivated collection: dried samples of the fruits grown from wild origin seed and cared for in our living collection.
Some of the plants in this collection are described as ‘endemic’. In botany this word is used in a different way from medicine. When referring to a plant, ‘endemic’ means that the wild species only occurs in one geographic area – it might be a country or an island. It does not occur naturally anywhere else in the world.
Some of the plants featured were and continue to be used as traditional medicines. The uses described are often based on an understanding of the world that have been very different from the scientists who recorded them, and the remedies may not have been assessed for efficacy and safety.
Herbarium collections are a crucial resource for botanical science but as this project reveals, Levon has made it accessible to a far wider audience than just the scientific community. We hope you enjoy taking this journey with us through the world of plants.
Lesley Scott, Assistant Herbarium Curator