Many of the earliest Canadian plant collectors contributed to the McGill University herbarium, making it a unique historical record and providing a window into our botanical past. Image of a cotton plant grown circa 1820, collection location unknown.
Ever wanted to walk through the park and know the names of all the trees? Our guide to the trees of the Montreal region is a great place to start.
McGill staff and students alike have been cataloguing natural history at the herbarium for over a century and a half, preserving vouchers essential to understanding both past and present patterns of plant biodiversity. There are currently about 140,000 sheets in the collection; specimens from Quebec, Ontario, and the circumpolar Arctic, including Greenland and Siberia, form the core of the collection. About 20,000 specimens have been digitized, and this dataset can be freely downloaded.