Connecting collections and collecting connections: Reconstructing the life of Mrs Edith Coleman

In 1934, Edith Coleman celebrated the opening of the new National Herbarium of Victoria with an article for The Argus newspaper. Edith hoped that the ‘handsome, dignified exterior of the building will encourage a better acquaintance with its contents’ as more than just ‘a vegetable mortuary, in which, in paper cerements, thousands of flowers that once brightened the earth and scented the summer air lay awaiting inevitable decay.
As a plant collector herself, Edith Coleman knew well the value of the plants stored in the herbaria: for botany, biogeography, taxonomy, and agriculture. Even after centuries, these dried specimens 'tell their stories as clearly as on the day they were pressed. They really are plant biographies.'