Welcome, and Introduction

We are bringing together a library of historical botany that we hope will extend as far back as Theophrastus, the ancient Greek father of plant taxonomy, and up to the plants of the Carolinas living today in the wild, and under curation in the South Carolina Botanical Garden.

The centerpiece of this library will be digital facsimile editions of herbaria collected by the first European botanists to explore the Carolinas, collecting and identifying the native plants of the region. Many of these volumes have been in the care of the Natural History Museum in London, as part of the Sloane Herbarium. Its curator, Mark Spenser, has been a generous collaborator in our work to photograph and document these collections.

The work of digitization, alignment, and analysis of the images resulting from this collaboration has been funded by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0916148 & No. 0916421. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).