Description:
Three generations of the Wendland family, Johann Christoph Wendland (1755–1828), Heinrich Ludolph Wendland(1792–1869) and Hermann Wendland (1825–1903), were outstanding court gardeners at the Royal Gardens of Herrenhausen(Hanover, Germany). The“Wendlands”not only enriched the botanical diversity of the gardens through plants obtained in exchange,purchased or collected during their own journeys, but they also achieved a good scientific reputation by publications on diverse bo-tanical themes including the description of new taxa. Moreover, there exists a herbarium of approximately 16,600 plant specimensrelated to these gardens, the Wendlands and their publications. Numerous papers dealing with the Wendlands and the Royal Gardensof Herrenhausen have been published. The Herrenhausen Herbarium, however, also known as the Wendland Herbarium, which wasdonated to the University of Göttingen in 1969, was so far neither digitized nor revised. Here, we describe the history and the currentdigitization of this herbarium, which includes specimens collected between 1780 and 1857. It consists of three major parts: the Her-renhausen Herbarium arranged according to the Linnaean System (13,035 specimens), the palm collection (1069 specimens) andsmaller collections (specimens collected by Hermann Wendland in Central America, collections of Carl Hoffmann fromCosta Rica and a part of Jakob Friedrich Ehrhart’s herbarium, who was a student of Linnaeus; approximately 2500 specimens).The systematic digitization of this historical herbarium as a whole revealed a seemingly unconventional arrangement of the speci-mens, which we explain here for the correct interpretation of collection data. Furthermore, and despite the meagre information onthe herbarium labels, we were able to identify 260 specimens from a trip of Heinrich Ludolph Wendland to Switzerland in 1820.By comparing the specimen labels with entries in his diary and travel report, we were able to retrace detailed information on localitiesand dates, providing historical biodiversity information. Also, the historical identification of these specimens was revised. A list ofcollectors represented in the Herrenhausen Herbarium is provided, which includes famous names such as Linnaeus and his studentsAfzelius, Bergius, Ehrhart, Schreber, and Thunberg