Departments

The Institute's various collections are curated by our four programmatic departments: Archives, Art, Bibliography and the Library. The Archives includes 25,000 portraits, 2,000 autograph letters, and manuscripts by and about botanists and others working in the plant sciences. The Art department holdings include over 30,000 original paintings (mostly 20th-century watercolors), drawings and original prints dating from the Renaissance to the present. The Bibliography department identifies, locates and examines the literature of the plant sciences to make records of essential information from which bibliographical tools can be created and published. The Library collection features 29,000 books, and botanical publications that date from the late 1400s and focus on the development of botany as a science and includes modern taxonomic monographs, floristic works and serial titles in the plant sciences.