Meise Botanic Garden (MeiseBG) has a history that goes back to 1796. Today, it is an internationally recognized botanic garden in a park of 92 hectares, and a centre of excellence for plant biodiversity research. MeiseBG houses the 15th largest herbarium (BR) in the world, holding 4 million preserved specimens, a comprehensive botanical library, a seed bank and a living plant collection with 25,000 accessions of plants from around the world. Research focuses on plant, algal and fungal taxonomy, evolution, biodiversity conservation, ecosystems and ethnobotany.
The preserved collections (including the herbarium, wood, carpological, slide and molecular collections) have a global scope, with a focus on Central Africa, Belgium, and Southwestern Europe, with additionally important historic collections from Latin America. Highlights are the private collections of famous 19th century botanists such as Henri Van Heurck (diatoms and vascular plants), Carl Von Martius (Flora brasiliensis and worldwide vascular plant collection), Heinrich Gustav von Reichenbach (orchids) and Crépin (wild roses), which form the historic core of the collections. A wide range of taxonomic groups are covered including: vascular plants, lichens, mosses, liverworts, fungi, myxomycetes, macroalgae, and diatoms.
Meise Botanic Garden is dedicated to digitally unlock these precious and unique botanical collections.

Online since: 26/11/2025
Last update: 02/11/2025

Conditions for using the data

Conditions for using the data: "Data will be distributed under a Creative Common Attribution 4.0 International Licence, except for the specimen’s barcode, country of origin and scientific name, which will instead be published under a CC0 (Public Domain) licence."

How to cite

Meise Botanic Garden Herbarium, BR. The data portal (www.botanicalcollections.be) provides a permanent Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that will uniquely identify a specimen and we will guarantee that this URI will always resolve to the data portal page where the image and label data of the specimen is displayed. An example of such a URI is https://www.botanicalcollections.be/specimen/BR0000024719261. This URI is the recommended method of citing our specimens.

Contacts

Director or head of department:
Frederik Leliaert
frederik.leliaert@plantentuinmeise.be
Curator:
Ann Bogaerts
ann.bogaerts@plantentuinmeise.be
Curator:
Sofie De Smedt
sofie.desmedt@plantentuinmeise.be
Information technology:
Mathias Dillen
mathias.dillen@plantentuinmeise.be