Ausstellungskatalog - Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum ...

Sammeln 1910 – 2010 · Collecting 1910 – 2010
schungsschwerpunkten wurde in diesen Jahren weltweit
und enzyklopädisch erworben. HWL
‘Limitless’ Growth
Botanical collections were – and are – acquired by four different
routes: exchange, purchase, gifts, and the activity of collecting itself.
This applies as much to preserved plants, journals and books
Naßpräparat der Muskatnuss Myristica fragrans, gesammelt von Otto
Warburg auf den Molukken. O. Warburg war Privatdozent für Tropische
Pflanzenkunde an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin und in
verschiedenen kolonialpolitischen Gremien aktiv. Die Pflanzenausbeute
seiner Ostasienreise 1885–89 übereignete er 1893 dem Botanischen Museum.
BGBM, Herbar.
89
Wardsche Kiste zum Transport lebender Pflanzen per Schiff. Diese Form
des Pflanzentransportes wurde noch bis ins frühe 20. Jahrhundert am
BGBM praktiziert. BGBM, Museum.
as to living plants and seeds. Nowadays the latter are only acquired
through exchange and active collecting.
In quantitative terms, the categories of exchange and gifts have
only undergone minor variations in the last hundred years. The
same cannot be said for purchases and the activity of collecting,
which were and are dependent on the available budget, so that
high fluctuations naturally occur over the decades. As a large institution
in the German capital everything was and is acquired
as a basic principle – with the application of quality control, of
course, but without geographic and thematic restriction. At the
same time the activity of collecting has been influenced both by
‘claims’ staked by other institutions worldwide and by prevailing
political conditions.
Up to the First World War a focus of acquisitions was on material
from the German colonies. The Botanische Zentralstelle für
die deutschen Kolonien, heavily promoted by Adolf Engler and
financed between 1891 and 1919 by the Foreign Office of the German
Reich situated on the grounds of the BGBM, played an important
role of mediator in this, especially when it came to tropical
economic plants. Regardless of individual research foci, acquisitions
in these years were made on a worldwide and encyclopaedic
basis. HWL