Six million and counting

So the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium reached its 6 millionth specimen. ((Incidentally, that’s about the number of germplasm accessions in all the world’s genebanks, give or take half a million.)) ((And another thing: if you’ve got nice photos of botanic gardens, you can enter them into a competition.)) Pretty impressive, as these things go, and as good an opportunity as any to sing the praises of natural history collections. The specimen in question is Anthurium centimillesimum, a new aroid species from Ecuador. I wonder if it will ever join the ranks of the world’s 35,000 cultivated plants.

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