The vasculum or botanical collecting box

At the risk of outing myself as an 'obsolete relic', I have to come clean and recount my own introduction to the 'vasculum or botanical collecting box'. In the 1960s my family lived in Leeds and on coming home for lunch from school one day with my brother and sister, we found an unexpected parcel addressed to us. I must have been seven or eight at the time. The packet came from the firm of Reynolds and Branson, suppliers of laboratory and photographic equipment, and had been sent at the request of our great aunt May Padman. Aunt May was a keen botanist and lived in the beautiful village of Boston Spa, on the spe- cies-rich Magnesian limestone rather than the species-poor, acidic Millstone grit around Leeds. On opening the package we found a strange, bright green, metal box, which our Mother told us was a 'vasculum'. Though no longer able to undertake fieldwork herself, having been immobilised by a stroke, Aunt May wanted to encourage our early botanical pursuits, as she had done with her niece Ann Woolliscroft while collecting belladonna and foxglove for the war effort during World War II. Curiously, according
to Mother, Aunt May never used a vasculum and for us children it came too late. Technology had moved on and this was now the era of collecting into polythene bags, but I still have the box as a memento of times past.

On seeing the French version of this remarkable book in 2022 my immediate reaction was that it needed to be made available to a much wider audience,
to readers of English, but also for its remarkable illustrations. These show not only the historical development of the vasculum itself, but a quite extraordinary range of images, from illustrations in catalogues of suppliers of scientific equipment, to vivid 'chromos' advertising some rather surprising products. Many of the latter are from the author's own collection, assembled over a period of many years. The other major reason for wanting to make the book more widely available is that it hugely extends the pioneering, but largely Anglocentric, work on the subject by David Allen and members of the Botanical Society of the British Isles.

The author welcomed the idea of a translation, but with quite unjustified modesty about her own skills in English, ran the text through a computer programme. While my own French is of barely schoolboy standard, it has proved possible to improve the computer-generated version and the result will, I am sure, come as a revela- tion to those interested in the history of botany and the practice of collecting.