Fungarium: Welcome to the Museum

Product Information

Digitisation is important for any collection, museum or archive, as it creates a permanent digital record of physical material collections. continues to this day, and a substantial number of IMI specimens are available also as living cultures The combined fungal collections of RBG Kew and IMI number around 1.25 million specimens including over UK-native organic Maitake tincture, cloned in our lab and extracted in the tincture kitchen on our mushroom farm in Somerset.

BBC Radio 4 presenter Sheila Dillon recently revealed she has taken mushroom supplements after her cancer treatment. Photograph: BBC

Important early Asian collections include those of A. Barclay (Himalayas); J.D. Hooker (Himalayas), T. Petch (Sri Lanka), and G.H.K. Thwaites (Sri Lanka), all of which are rich in type collections. The collections of T.F. Chipp (Malaya) and C.G. Hansford (Sri Lanka) are also at Kew. Native to Europe, Asia and North America. Our Reishi is indigenous to Somerset, originally found in the wild in Wells and then cloned by us in our lab in Bristol, making our Reishi extract the first commercially available native Ganoderma Lucidum tincture in the UK.

Ganoderma (Greek words “Ganos”&“derma”) mean ‘shining skin’. The specific epithet lucidum also means ‘shining’. Lingzhi, it’s Chinese name, (líng + zhī) loosely translates to “divine fungus”.Despite the delicate and precarious processes involved, Tom and Henry still manage to crop over a tonne of the finest quality organic mushrooms every month. The result is a feast of colour, texture and taste, including maitake, shiitake, oysters, wine caps, lion’s mane, reishi, turkey tail, and cordyceps. Hericium, the genus name, is likely derived from the Latin word ‘hirtus’, which means rough or shaggy. Erinaceus means much the same. Be a repository for specimens that substantiate records of fungi in New Zealand and, especially, plant disease records for New Zealand and for South Pacific Island countries George Massee succeeded Cooke in 1892, followed by E.M. Wakefield in 1911, both continuing the tradition of identification, description, and exchange established by Cooke. Most of the work relating to overseas plant pathology ceased with the establishment of the Imperial Bureau of Mycology in 1920 (better known as the Imperial Mycological Institute to which it was renamed in 1930). After R.W.G. Dennis became head of mycology in 1944, Kew mycologists had the opportunity to collect overseas, leading to the publication of a series of important regional mycotas.