Collect
A whole plant where possible — root, stem, leaf and flower — lifted with its locality, altitude, soil and date written on the spot. A specimen without a date is a decoration, not a record.
Cat. FW-0001 · Southern Highlands, AU
A living archive
of pressed flora.
Since 1897 we have collected, pressed and catalogued the plants of the southern ranges — forty-one thousand sheets, each one a dated record of where a species stood on a particular morning.
Asplenium bulbiferum
41,208Mounted sheets
612Families represented
88Recorded expeditions
129Years of records
Section 02
Recent accessions
Sheets mounted in the last quarter, drawn from the Tablelands survey and two donated private collections.
Section 03
How a sheet is made
The process has changed very little since the first curator wrote it down in a notebook we still keep in the reading room.
Press
Laid between blotters in a screw press for ten to fourteen days, changed daily at first. Fleshy material is dried more slowly; anything that browns has been hurried.
Mount
Strapped to 297 × 420 acid-free stock with linen tape, never glued flat. Loose seed and fragments go into a folded capsule in the lower right corner.
Catalogue
Accession number, determination, collector and revision history. Every later opinion is added beneath the last — nothing is erased, including the mistakes.
On method
“The sheet outlives the botanist, the argument and the forest.”
E. M. Fernwood, curator 1897–1931
Reading room
Open to researchers and illustrators Tuesday to Saturday. Sheets are retrieved to order; allow two working days.
Loans
Material travels to recognised institutions under standard herbarium loan terms, for twelve months.
Digitisation
Roughly 60% of the collection has been imaged at 600 dpi. The remainder is scheduled through 2031.
Section 05
From the journal
Field notes, curatorial arguments and the occasional apology for a determination made in 1954.
What the 1911 Tablelands sheets tell us about fire return
Four decades of grassland collections, read against the district fire register, describe a shorter cycle than the one we assumed.
9 min 02 Aug 2026In defence of the paper capsule
Loose seed has been falling out of envelopes for a century. A short case for folding them the old way.
4 min 21 Jul 2026Three misfiled Grevillea and how they got that way
A cabinet audit turned up specimens shelved by collector rather than family — the residue of a rushed move in 1968.
6 minSection 06
Apply for a reader’s card
Access to the cabinets, the accession ledgers and high-resolution plates is granted to researchers, students and working illustrators. There is no fee.