From Engler to APGIV: a short history of the botanical arrangement of the Western Australian Herbarium collections

Modern herbarium collections typically have one of three different systems of arrangement: alphabetical, phylogenetic, or a combination of the two.Originally Western Australia had three recognised botanical collections housed in separate institutions.It is not documented how the early collections were initially arranged by Bernard Henry Woodward, the Director of the Museum and Art Gallery herbarium collections , by the Forests Department Herbarium (established in 1916), or by the Bureau of Agriculture's first botanist Alexander Morrison in 1897; however it is likely they were all arranged in alphabetical order by family.In 1913, Frederick Stoward, Botanist and Pathologist of the Department of Agriculture (renamed in 1898 from Bureau), mentioned a need for rearrangement and cataloguing of the Herbarium, which was undertaken by assistant Mr [F.W.] Wakefield (Stoward 1913).In 1920, Desmond Andrew Herbert, appointed Economic Botanist and Pathologist, was assisted by Vera McNeilance Prowse in a further re-organisation of this herbarium.Numbering about 6,000 specimens, several collections the herbarium had received were combined, including those of James Drummond, William V. Fitzgerald, George Maxwell, and Ferdinand von Mueller (Gardner 1947;Green 1990; Underwood 2011).The first documented systematic family arrangement of botanical collections of Western Australia commenced in July 1924 with the appointment of Charles Austin Gardner as Assistant Botanist in the Department of Agriculture and was completed by June 1926(Carne 1925;Carne 1926).Being taken with the Englerian notion of arranging families in order of increasing flower complexity within monocotyledons and dicotyledons, Gardner arranged the families and genera in the Herbarium according to Engler's system published in Engler and Prantl's (1887-1915) Die Natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien.When the State Herbarium was officially established in 1929 within the Department of Agriculture headquarters on St Georges Terrace (Fitzpatrick 2011), after the amalgamation of the Department of Agriculture Herbarium and Forests Department Herbarium, this classification system was continued.The collection was soon rehoused within the State Observatory in West Perth (December 1933 to 1959) (Underwood 2011).At about this time Gardner, now Government Botanist and Curator of the State Herbarium (Green 1990), allocated a consecutive number for every plant family in the world then recognised by Engler.Where a family had not been recorded for Western Australia, it was still allocated a number, despite there being no folders or specimens in the Western Australian Herbarium at the time.Gardner annotated a copy of J.C. Willis' (1919) 4 th edition of A Dictionary of the Flowering