Personal Reference Collections

You can collect for the intention of depositing at an herbaria for research purposes, but many researchers have their own personal reference collections. These are usually small sets of specimens for the researcher to easily refer to when working in specialized groups (e.g. exotic weeds or hybrids of British Columbia).

Collecting for Hobby

You may also want to collect plants for a hobby. This is how many botanists first began, observing and pressing flowers because they are beautiful. If you do press flowers or collect for a hobby, we encourage you to still collect the most basic collection information; location, date collected and your name. Some specimens that were originally collected as a hobby have now been donated to the UBC Herbarium, and are first observations or new populations that have been never documented previously.

Everyone loves Crafts!

We also believe that any plant collected, no matter how bad its pressing, is not a loss. You can always find creative ways to use your specimen.

For instance, making gift tags from specimens that didn’t quite work out.