Sep 20, 2026 · 19 min · 10 segments
Inside Lincoln’s Allan Herbarium lies a vault of over 800,000 dried plants—a living history of Aotearoa’s flora. In this episode, collection manager Dr. Ines Schönberger unlocks the cabinets to reveal…
Ines SchönbergerGuestKadambri RaghukumarHostThat's Germany-born Ines Schonberger, who's showing me around this labyrinth of botanical archives today.
There are other cabinets which have a beautiful smell, like the holy grass or the antoxanthum cabinet smells beautiful.
And there are plant cabinets which you might not want to open because they smell like old socks.
People always say, are you working with dead plants in a plant morgue? And I say, wow, it's a full body experience working in here.
A herbarium, if you're anything like Ines, can be a sensory treasure trove.
The Allen Herbarium holds over 800,000 specimens, with about 3,000 to 5,000 being added every year.
It's what, 800,000 approximately? We have about 800,000 objects here, that's correct.
It's just mind-boggling if you think that every single specimen, every single item tells a story.
I'm walking through cabinets that store specimens collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander during Captain James Cook's first voyage to New Zealand, circa 1770.
And the beauty is also that you have to not only work with plants, you also work with people.
You know exactly where the founder of this collection was on Christmas Day in 1928, because he collected a plant and then he put it in the collection.
So we're working with the data, we're working with the plant itself, so it's never boring, so it's just an exciting place.
That's Germany-born Ines Schonberger, who's showing me around this labyrinth of botanical archives today.
There are other cabinets which have a beautiful smell, like the holy grass or the antoxanthum cabinet smells beautiful.
And there are plant cabinets which you might not want to open because they smell like old socks.
People always say, are you working with dead plants in a plant morgue? And I say, wow, it's a full body experience working in here.
A herbarium, if you're anything like Ines, can be a sensory treasure trove.
The Allen Herbarium holds over 800,000 specimens, with about 3,000 to 5,000 being added every year.
It's what, 800,000 approximately? We have about 800,000 objects here, that's correct.
It's just mind-boggling if you think that every single specimen, every single item tells a story.
I'm walking through cabinets that store specimens collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander during Captain James Cook's first voyage to New Zealand, circa 1770.
And the beauty is also that you have to not only work with plants, you also work with people.
You know exactly where the founder of this collection was on Christmas Day in 1928, because he collected a plant and then he put it in the collection.
So we're working with the data, we're working with the plant itself, so it's never boring, so it's just an exciting place.
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