Breaking the silence of the 500-year-old smiling garden of everlasting flowers: The En Tibi book herbarium

We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16th-century Italian En Tibi herbarium is a large, luxurious book with c. 500 dried plants, made in the Renaissance scholarly circles that developed botany as a distinct discipline. Its Latin inscription, translated as “Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers”, suggests that this herbarium was a gift for a patron of the emerging botanical science. We follow an integrative approach that includes a botanical similarity estimation of the En Tibi with contemporary herbaria (Aldrovandi, Cesalpino, “Cibo”, Merini, Estense) and analysis of the book’s watermark, paper, binding, handwriting, Latin inscription and the morphology and DNA of hairs mounted under specimens. Rejecting the previous origin hypothesis (Ferrara, 1542–1544), we show that the En Tibi was made in Bologna around 1558. We attribute the En Tibi herbarium to Francesco Petrollini, a neglected 16th-century botanist, to whom also belongs, as clarified herein, the controversial “Erbario Cibo” kept in Rome. The En Tibi was probably a work on commission for Petrollini, who provided the plant material for the book. Other people were apparently involved in the compilation and offering of this precious gift to a yet unknown person, possibly the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I. The En Tibi herbarium is a Renaissance masterpiece of art and science, representing the quest for truth in herbal medicine and botany. Our multidisciplinary approach can serve as a guideline for deciphering other anonymous herbaria, kept safely “hidden” in treasure rooms of universities, libraries and museums

Mogami Tokunai’s wood collection from Hokkaido, Japan: an early record of Ainu wood culture

International audienceDuring the court journey to Edo (Tokyo) in 1826, the famous Japan explorer Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866) met an old and wise mathematician, explorer, and ethnographer, Mogami Tokunai (1755–1836). Tokunai not only allowed Siebold to copy sensitive maps of disputed territories in Northern Japan, but also donated him a set of 45 Japanese wood samples, most of them decorated with paintings of the foliage of the trees from which the wood came, and later provided with interesting notes on their timber uses by the Ainu people in “Jezo” (or Ezo-chi, more or less equivalent with modern Hokkaido). Based mainly on earlier detailed studies by Prof. Takao Yamaguchi and Prof. Nobushige Kato, we will discuss this collection in the context of contemporary and later wood collections and its significance for forest products research in and beyond Japan. Other Japanese wood collections taken to the Netherlands by Siebold were used for the very first Ph.D. studies on wood anatomy in Leiden, and possibly also in Munich. Siebold’s most important disciple Ito Keisuke (or Ito “Keiske”, or “Keisuke Itoh”, 1803–1901) oversaw the decoration of a set of painted wood samples for teaching purposes in Tokyo in the 1880s. From the 1870s onwards, Japan was actively promoting its timber resources at World Expositions in Vienna, Philadelphia, and Paris. In the latter two venues with another special type of wood collection: sections mounted on the pages of a book, possibly inspired by a concept developed by the German forestry scientist Hermann Nördlinger