About us

The Herbarium (RNG) is a research and teaching facility, containing around 300,000 specimens of flowering plants, conifers, cycads, ferns, lycophytes and non-vascular plants.

Herbarium RNG was founded in 1900, and incorporates RU (Department of Agricultural Botany, University of Reading),  SPN (Previously the University of Southampton Herbarium)) and WRO (weed herbarium of the Long Ashton Research Station, Bristol).

We receive visitors and requests for identification help from all over the world. We have extensive collections of plants, especially from Europe and the Mediterranean, temperate South America, and the UK.

The herbarium is used to teach a range of undergraduate modules, to support the MSc in Plant Diversity and MSc in Species Identification and Survey Skills. It is a major research resource and has a high proportion of modern specimens that have been used for DNA extraction.

The herbarium remains active in acquisitions and the Herbarium exchange programme.  We are a CITES registered organisation (GB 016) and a member of the International Plant Exchange Network (IPENcode RNG).