Armstrong Herbarium 2

John Francis Armstrong was one of the first Government Gardeners in Christchurch, who, with his son Joseph pioneered the discovery, cultivation and study of the rapidly disappearing New Zealand flora during the late 1800s. Although indigenous plants were not popular at that time, the Armstrongs indulged their fascination with the local flora while attending to official public demands for exotic parkland trees and bedding plant displays in the Botanic Gardens. When in 1889 these demands became too strong, John and Joseph resigned their positions and took their precious herbarium specimens with them. The number of specimens continued to grow until Joseph's death in 1926. The collection was almost lost to science until a friend of the family rescued "quite a lorry load" of material from Joseph's house and deposited it in a corner of an office at the Botanic Gardens. There the specimens languished until being rescued again in 1933 by Professor Arnold Wall who realised their significance and catalogued over 2500 specimens. Only ever 'on loan' from the Botanic Gardens, the various custodians who gave the Armstrong Herbarium shelter over the next 80 years were not able to properly curate the specimens or to make them available for study. All that has changed. The Armstrong Herbarium has now been gifted to the Allan Herbarium at Landcare Research. This is the second batch of specimens from the Armstrong Herbarium to be uploaded. The first batch of specimens can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/ArmstrongHerbarium  The total number of tasks for this dataset is: 1028, number transcribed is 231 and number validated is 171.