The Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew contains around seven million plant specimens; but during a recent digitisation project, researchers uncovered horticultural trickery that had been buried for decades.
From the 17th to the 19th century, animal hoaxes weren’t too uncommon. Most notably, mermaids were widely believed to actually exist, and this was in part due to people making curious creations that combined the torso of a monkey with the tail of a fish, producing striking (if not terrifying) taxidermy hybrids.
You may also like
- 9 big garden red flags when buying a house (DON'T ignore #4)
- How a former pig farm became a tranquil garden that's a haven for wildlife
Some were alarmingly good. A famous example is the “Piltdown Man” from 1912; a fraudulent fossil of an ancient human constructed from an orangutan’s jaw and chimpanzee’s teeth. This clever hoax managed to fool the scientific community for almost 40 years before anyone realised the truth. Fraudulent discoveries of exciting new creatures aren’t uncommon in scientific history. They usually involved animals - but this time, the tricksters were botanical.
While exploring some of the millions on specimens at Kew, digitisation curator Eloise Johl noticed a handful of plants that seemed odd.
"I found a strange-looking specimen in Kew’s Herbarium collection," says Eloise. "It seemed to show the same kind of trickery behind the old monkey‑fish hoax"
"I noticed that it was determined as a mixed collection, meaning that there were multiple species on one sheet. Then, having taken a closer look, I could see the join where the flower had been inserted into the branch. At the time I noticed some writings on the folder saying it was a hoax specimen – yet it wasn't common knowledge that we had such rare specimens in our collection and so I became very curious in the story behind it. This led to me going down a bit of a rabbit hole..."
Collected by Auguste Glaziou in 1882, the specimen she found was originally identified and described a decade later as Quesnelia tillandsioides by J. G. Baker, Assistant Keeper of the Kew Herbarium. The 'newly-discovered plant' was considered convincing enough to be formally published and even illustrated in Flora Brasiliensis in 1892.
Originally from France, Glaziou had relocated to Rio de Janeiro in the mid 1800s at the request of Emperor Dom Pedro II. During this time, Glaziou participated in plant collecting in - what is known today as - Brasilia.
It was not until 1906 that the truth was uncovered and Glaziou’s secrets were revealed. The specimen was a carefully constructed combination of the flowers of Quesnelia liboniana inserted into the rosette of another plant entirely. It was a further 60 years before a botanist suggested the base plant was Vriesea poenulata, a species also notably collected by Glaziou.
This specimen raised the question: was this deception accidental, or did Glaziou himself construct the hoax?
Digging further into Glaziou’s botanical career, it seems he was deliberately altering the collection information of plant specimens in his favour, making his collections look more impressive by lying about new plants that he’d ‘found’ in certain ‘rare’ locations.
Those studying these specimens have found that the original collection labels often remain on the specimen, with Glaziou’s false data written alongside. Glaziou changed information regarding the location plants were collected, sometimes resulting in his collection being the only one in the region. Such alterations made his collections and his role as a collector seem more important.
You may also like
- This subtropical oasis is a must-visit garden this year
- Ashamed of your front garden? Fix it up fast with our expert guide and real garden inspiration
A researcher studying just one plant family (Melastomataceae), documented a two-page list of specimens in which Glaziou had revised dates and localities directly on existing labels. Another paper suggests he was even directly pirating specimens by copying exact labels from specimens collected earlier by someone else!
While digging further into the collection, Eloise found more stange-looking specimens. "Upon first glance, these specimens seem unremarkable," she says. "However, if you look closely, you can see that someone has carefully inserted the flowers of a Viburnum plant into the branches of an Aesculus and deemed it a new (yet completely fake) ‘species’: Actinotinus sinensis."
These specimens were collected in Patung, central China, and sent to Kew in the 1880s by Dr Augustine Henry.
In letters to Kew, Henry apologised and explained that he had been unaware of the deception, attributing it to the local collector he employed in Patung. When Kew identified all the specimens sent by Henry from Patung, they found two more plant specimens where shoots from one species had been inserted into another.
A major question arises from these fraudulent specimens: what was the motivation behind producing them?
"To answer this, I believe we need to peek into the historical context of the time they were collected," says Eloise. "In the Victorian era, when Henry and Glaziou’s specimens were collected, botany was very much an imperial science. Valuable plants were being extracted from colonies and grown in Europe, or other colonies, for food, medicine, and industry. Today within botany, emphasis is placed on scientific innovation and collaboration, whereas in the nineteenth century, it was more profitable and collectors were being paid for presenting the newest, rarest, most valuable plants. It seems that this may have fuelled hoaxes and exaggerations."
"This system had significant ecological consequences," she adds. "But it also shaped the lives of the local collectors who carried out much of the fieldwork. Their names, perspectives, and motivations were rarely recorded, leaving major gaps in the historical record and their stories untold."
"Many worked under payment structures that rewarded speed and the discovery of rare species, conditions that could create considerable pressure. If Henry’s claim is true and it was the local collectors who created the hoax, then it could be these pressures that contributed to the fabrication of some specimens. Alternatively, it may well have been Henry after all. The truth, of course, is forever lost to history."
The impact of someone like Glaziou’s fraudulent specimens on the collections at Kew must also be considered. He was collecting actively from around 1860 to 1895, and became one of Brazil’s most influential collectors.
"As it currently stands, we have 8929 herbarium records in our database where Glaziou is listed as a collector," says Eloise. "Who knows how many of these contain fraudulent information!"
As digitisation unlocks and compiles the collection data of around 7 million specimens in Kew’s Herbarium collection, it will be easier to highlight inconsistencies in the data and uncover interesting historical stories such as this one.
