Guided tour with Thoralf Weiß | Meeting point: Greifswald, Soldmannstraße 15 | Participation: 9 euros

In 1748, Christian Stephan Scheffel (1693-1760) donated the herbarium of the professors of medicine at the University of Greifswald, which had been started in 1650 and was still private, for a future botanical garden. This herbarium, parts of which still exist, is one of the special treasures of the university collections. Several old documents from the herbarium of the University of Greifswald date back to the 18th century, when the botanical garden was established under the Swedish-Pomeranian botanist Samuel Gustav Wilcke (1736-1790). Around 1850, the collections underwent a decisive expansion with the establishment of a botanical museum by the botany professor Julius Münter (1815-1885). Münter had plants from what was then New Western Pomerania and Rügen systematically collected. However, many specimens, some of them from outside Europe, were acquired via the botanical exchange societies that flourished in the 19th century. The size of the herbarium is constantly being expanded through additions by botanists from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

After the reunification of Germany, a generous financial grant from the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft in the 1990s enabled the herbarium to be properly catalogued.

Since October 2013, the herbarium has been located at the new site of the Botanical Institute at Soldmannstraße 15, where it houses a collection of teaching aids with around 3,000 exhibits and the herbarium containing around 300,000 specimens. This acts as the state herbarium for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and is therefore the most important centre for the documentation of regional botanical research. It is connected to the international loan system and is available to scientists and, after registration, also to interested laypersons.
University of Greifswald

Thoralf Weiß, Head of the Arboretum, will give a guided tour of the valuable collection and provide insights into the history of the classical herbarium arch to the virtual world.