Digitising Philippine Flora is an interdisciplinary collaborative project between the Cambridge University Herbarium and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. 

This project focuses on the Cambridge University Herbarium's holdings of plants collected by Hugh Cuming (1791-1865), a nineteenth-century British collector and naturalist who operated in the Philippines during the 1830s. The project aims to use Cuming's Philippine specimens to trace the story of Cuming’s voyage to the Philippines while situating the collection within the broader history of Philippine natural history. We started out with just a couple of boxes of unidentified plants found on a shelf in the back of the Herbarium and have since found over 3500 specimens within the Herbarium.

In addition to locating specimens collected by Cuming in the Herbarium’s backlog and world collection, we are digitising the sheets, enabling us to work with citizen scientists and Philippine botanists to identify plants, transcribe descriptions, and better understand the rich Philippine flora represented in the collection. 

With a focus on collaboration and community participation, the project has used the newly digitised Cuming collection as an opportunity to establish a workshop and seminar with botanists, historians, anthropologists on Philippine flora, building ties between Cambridge and other global institutions.

Digitising Philippine Flora is supported by a grant from Collections, Connections, Communities. 

Hugh Cuming (1791-1865) was a British naturalist and collector. 

On January 15, 1836, the British naturalist and collector Hugh Cuming (1791-1865) set sail from Liverpool on a long voyage to the Philippines. The excursion to the Philippines was not Cuming’s first journey abroad. In 1819, Cuming had travelled to Chile and in the 1820s he undertook collecting voyages down the coast of South America and to Polynesia. By 1835, following many years voyaging and living in South America and Polynesia, Cuming had established himself as a prolific and successful collector. His trip to the Philippines was keenly anticipated by important figures in zoological and botanical circles including William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865) and the Edward, Thirteenth Earl of Derby (1775-1851). Naturalists in England were eager to learn more about what Cuming might discover in these relatively unexplored Islands.

During Cuming's voyages, he shipped around 130,000 specimens of dried plant material, several living orchid plants, 30,000 conchological species and varieties, and also large numbers of birds, reptiles, quadrupeds and insects. These collections were sold to and distributed among many individuals and institutions. Over 3000 dried plant specimens are now located in the Cambridge University Herbarium, making the collection a significant repository of material gathered by Cuming.

References

Dance, S. Peter. ‘Hugh Cuming (1791-1865) Prince of Collectors’. Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 9, no. 4 (1 April 1980): 477–501. https://doi.org/10.3366/jsbnh.1980.9.4.477.

Margócsy, Dániel. ‘Malinowski and Malacology: Global Value Systems and the Issue of Duplicates’. The British Journal for the History of Science 55, no. 3 (September 2022): 389–409. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000255.

Reeve, Lovell. Portraits of Men of Eminence in Literature, Science, and Art, with Biographical Memoirs: The Photographs from Life. L. Reeve & Company, 1864.

Scales, Helen. ‘Gathering Spirals: On the Naturalist and Shell Collector Hugh Cuming’. In Naturalists in the Field, 629–45. Brill, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004323841_022.