Archival Folders for Herbarium

Purchase 30 archival folders to protect the Garden's valuable "type specimens" in our herbarium.

The Herbarium at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden
An herbarium is a library of pressed, dried plants mounted onto archival paper and used by plant researchers to understand the history, evolution, geographic distribution, diversity, and phenology (flowering and fruiting times) of plants.

With over 1.2 million specimens the RSABG Herbarium is the third largest herbarium in California and is world-renown for its strength in documenting the diversity, distribution, variation and ecology of more than 6,500 California native plant species. The Herbarium’s holdings of southern California plants exceed 250,000 specimens and are unsurpassed by any other herbarium.

Type specimens and the type collection project at RSABG
A type specimen is a specimen selected to serve as a reference when a species new to science is first named. These specimens are extremely valuable and important to botanists and the scientific community. They are often specially curated in herbaria where they are frequently stored separately from the main collection. RSABG holds over 7,000 type specimens, including those of nearly 700 types described by the prominent late 1800’s U.S. botanist Marcus E. Jones. The Jones types are especially important to researchers working on plants from western U.S. and Mexico and are frequently consulted. Plants that are well represented in RSABG’s type collection include Cacti, Iris, Beard tongue, Cypress, and Evening primrose.

For the long-term preservation of such valuable specimens, they must be stored in their own specimen folder and housed in steel cabinets. Recently, some testing of the pH levels of the type specimen folders revealed that these folders are not acid-free. One important component of the long-term preservation for any plant specimen collection is to preserve them in acid-free folders. Folders with an acidic content have the potential to degrade the specimen. Thus, the preservation goals with the RSABG type collection is to move them out of the acid folders and into acid free folders.