Anne-de-Beaujeu Museum. Moulins / e-ReColNat Infrastructure

The departmental Anne-de-Beaujeu Museum, mainly famous for its art and archeological collections, also possesses an Herbarium! Founded in the middle of the 19th century, the Museum did house, with an encyclopedic perspective, collections of natural history (mineralogy, zoology, paleontology…). The sole botanical representative is an herbarium, bearing the name of its author, Abel Migout.

Thanks to the herbaria of France census implemented during the e-E-ReColNat program (RECOLNAT-ANR-11-INBS-0004), this Herbarium, of significant scientific interest for the Allier area, was rediscovered and benefited from an important inventory and maintenance work, in preparation for its digitization.

Abel Migout (Bordeaux, 1830 - Moulins, 1894), botanist emeritus, professor of physics at the Moulins High school, is the author of* La Flore du département de l’Allier* (Moulins 1866) still, to date, the only flora focusing on this area. His Herbarium somehow represents the “memory” of the biodiversity of this department. It also includes sheets from other collectors or botanists such as Allard, Billet, Bourgougnon or Jay, to only name a few. Their exchanges show the richness of the collaboration between botanists. For instance, some plants were collected in or around Nohant (Indre), with Georges Sand and his son Maurice. Indeed, two presses contain samples unfamiliar to the department (Puy-de-Dôme, Indre, southern France, Mediterranean basin…). This Herbarium counts many presently protected or threatened taxa, and establishes a valuable baseline for the study and the tracking of the plant biology of the department.

At this point in time, we do not know when this herbarium has entered the Museum Collections. . It could have been donated by the widow of Abel Migout. It was retrospectively inventoried in 2001 (inventory Id number: 2001.2.1 to 24).

This Herbarium comprises 24 presses, encompassing about 3,960 pieces, of variable preservation state. Some specimens like Asteraceae or leguminous plants have suffered from past insects’ attacks. The sheets maintaining them are sometimes also damaged.

A computer file now gathers all the information on this Herbarium. Furthermore, presses were carefully cleaned, and are kept laid flat in suitable preservation boxes. Oxidized pins holding sheets were removed. All of these actions were successfully carried out thanks to several trainees and volunteers, who benefited from advices from the scientific staff of the Clermont-Ferrand University Herbaria (UNIVEGE, CLF Herbaria - Blaise-Pascal University). A significant attachment work has to be done before the sheets are digitized.