Lyon Botanical Garden
The Botanical Garden of Lyon preserves 57 herbaria, encompassing 250,000 units, which makes him the second biggest herbarium in Rhône-Alpes.
A large part of the collection is composed of loose samples in folders. In order to make them available to the scientific community, the samples are gradually restored, attached, registered in a database (4D software), and digitized.
The oldest herbaria were made by Paolo Boccone (1633-1707), Jean-Baptiste Goiffon (1658-1730), and René Marmion (1699). The largest herbarium is the General Herbarium, that was made in 1830 by merging several herbaria, including those of Marc-Antoine Claret de la Tourrette (1729-1793), Jean-Emmanuel Gilibert (1741-1814), Marie Jacques Philippe Mouton-Fontenille de La Clotte (1769-1837), and of Nicolas-Charles Seringe (1776-1859). Herbaria acquired since then remained self-standing, their authors are Jean-Philippe Becker, Eugène Foudras, Isidore Franc, Jean-Pierre Fray, Louis Lortet, George Roffavier, Marc-Antoine Rollet, Paul Antoine Sagot, etc.
The collection includes vascular plants, algae, mosses, liverworts, fungi, and lichens of various origins, and that botanists often obtained via exchanges. Samples were collected since the 17th century to the present day, mostly in the Lyon area, but also in faraway places, by botanists and famous figures such as Philibert Commerson, Joseph Dombey, Alexis Jordan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Philipp Salzmann, Friedrich Sellow, Carl Peter Thunberg, Nathaniel Wallich, Eugène Vieillard, Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyramus de Candolle, Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, Antoine Gouan, Pierre Sonnerat, or George Bentham. Within each herbarium, specimens are classified in alphabetical order of name species, and combined in bundles among their respective families, which are stored following the systematic classification.
Access specific data of the herbarium
Contact
Frédéric Danet : frederic.danet@mairie-lyon.fr
Collection of plants made in 1699 by René Marmion, pharmacist from Valence, the names added were handwritten by Jean-Baptiste Goiffon, doctor in Lyon. © Herbier du Jardin botanique de la ville de Lyon
- A folder from the general Herbarium before restoration, containing several samples of the genus Gentiana harvested by Claret de la Tourrette and his correspondents: Carlo Allioni, Joseph Dombey, Antoine Gouan, Philippe-Isidore Picot de Lapeyrouse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, etc. © Herbier du Jardin botanique de la ville de Lyon
Type of Potentilla splendens collected by Wallich in Nepal in 1819 then donated by De Candolle to Seringe in 1825. © Herbier du Jardin botanique de la ville de Lyon