John Dransfield

A guide to collecting palms

Because of their frequently bulky nature and unfamiliar morphology, palms need special attention if they are to be adequately collected. A guide is presented to indicate how to go about preparing good herbarium specimens of palms and what notes to make in the field. The making of good herbarium specimens of palms is a laborious, time-consuming, and often rather unpleasant activity, and because of this many palm taxa are very poorly represented in herbaria. The general collector, faced with limited time and money and with the need to collect large numbers of plants to satisfy funding bodies or exchange agreements, tends to shy away from such awkward plants. To the specialist, however, the unhurried careful collection of a majestic palm can be immensely satisfying. It is probably too much to expect general collectors to use the amount of time spent by a specialist palm collector in the preparation of herbarium specimens, but with relatively little effort, the usual frustratingly inadequate palm specimen can be much improved. Guidelines for the collection of palms have already been provided by Tomlinson (1965) and, for climbing palms, Dransfield (1979). It is hoped that the present article will reach a wider audience and encourage more careful palm collecting.