George F. Ledingham Herbarium
The late Dr. G. F. Ledingham (1911-2006) established the Herbarium in 1945. He devoted a good portion of his lifetime to expanding the collections of the Herbarium, both while he was a full-time faculty member and during twenty plus years of retirement. The Herbarium has almost 50,000 vascular plant specimens, 10,000 bryophyte specimens, and 10,000 specimens of lichens. An abridged history of the herabarium, as written by Dr. Ledingham for the 20th anniversary of the University of Regina:
Introduction
The herbarium here was founded in 1945 and has had world wide recognition since 1952. The collection of plants is recognized in Herbaria of the World by the code letter USAS. The herbarium has more than 60,000 plant specimens and serves this part of the globe, a part seldom visited by botanists.
A brief overview
The herbarium became a public reality in 1945 when Ledingham became Assistant Professor of Biology in Regina. The first plants in his collection were species of Carex (sedges) which had been collected 1933-37 while he was summer assistant in the Biology Department in the University of Saskatchewan. At that time, he was working on his Master’s degree under the supervision of W.P. Thompson. However, he also went on field trips with W. P. Fraser (1867-1943), who in his retirement years was building the University herbarium. The exciting part of those field trips was the finding of additional species of Carex. Starting with 6 species in 1933, they were able finally to list 98 species (Ledingham & Fraser [1943] American Midland Naturalist, Vol 29, pp 42-50).
Herbarium List of Specimens & Digitization
We have recently compiled the Saskatchewan vascular plants part of the Herbarium (slightly over 20,000 accessions) into a list. The list will be continually updated, including adding the current species names for those species whose taxonomy has changed (the list mostly shows the species names at the time of collection, and does not yet reflect taxonomic revisions). The list is available here.
The Herbarium is also in the early stages of digitizing the Saskatchewan vascular plants. We are scanning the specimens at 1600 dpi and will eventually make the scans available on a server. Some examples of scans of accessions (at a lower resolution) are available here.
Ledingham Herbarium in the Media & Community
Contact us:
- Erin Ennis (Dept. of Biology), erin.ennis@uregina.ca
- Mel Hart (Assoc. Dean of Science), mel.hart@uregina.ca
- Harold Weger (Dept. of Biology), harold.weger@uregina.ca
Thank you to our Donors!
The work happening in the George F. Ledingham Herbarium is made possible by the generous support of Career Launcher, the Saskatchewan Fish and Wildlife Development Fund, the Faculty of Science, and private donors.
If you would like to contribute to our project, please visit our fundraising page.