Still Life
When Philip Miller, chief gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden, collected a sample of Lavandula x intermedia subsp. intermedia in the summer of 1731, he could scarcely have imagined it would still be in a collection some 300 years later. Yet today, pressed and labelled, Miller’s specimen is the oldest entry in the herbarium collection at RHS Wisley. What’s more, Lavandula x intermedia is widely grown today, being especially good for oil extraction. In this lies the brilliance of preserved flowers and herbaria specifically: they provide a window on the past and help us consider what the future might look like.
With about 90,000 pressed plant species, the herbarium at RHS Wisley is
