Henri Ferdinand Van Heurck (°1839 - 1909) was manager of the family paint and varnish factory and professor in chemistry at the Industrial High School in Antwerp. As a self-taught botanist, he started studying, together with other naturalists, the flora of Antwerp. Later on he carried out pioneering work in microscopy, and became famous for his research on diatoms. He convinced the municipality of Antwerp to establish a Botanic Garden and became its director in 1877. The start of the exploration of the flora of Antwerp in 1858 was also the start of his enormous collection. With great patience and heaps of money he systematically added more specimens to his worldwide collection. In 1867 he bought the famous Sieber - Von Reichenbach herbarium which brings his collection to a total of more than 250,000 specimens from 60,000 different species, one of the largest herbaria in the world at that time. After his death, his collections and herbarium were purchased by the municipality of Antwerp and in 2006, they were donated to Meise Botanic Garden. In 2021 the collection of his vascular plants were digitized and its importance will be revealed to the public through our virtual herbarium www.botanicalcollections.be