In the herbarium : the hidden world of collecting and preserving plants Maura C. Flannery tells the history of herbaria from the earliest collections belonging to such advocates of the technique as sixteenth century botanist Luca Ghini to the collections of poets politicians and painters and to the digitization of these precious specimens today. She charts the growth of herbaria during the Age of Exploration the development of classification systems to organize the collections and herbarias indispensable role in the tracking of climate change and molecular evolution. Herbaria also have historical aesthetic cultural and ethnobotanical value these preserved plants can be linked to the Indigenous peoples who used them the collectors who sought them out and the scientists who studied them