Called a botanical box or herbalization box, vasculum or Botanisiertrommel, the tin box, green or black, has accompanied generations of plant hunter botanists for more than two centuries, on the Old Continent as around the world. It has hosted myriads of plant harvests that still make our great herbarium proud today. At the Belle Époque, beautifully decorated, it also became a child’s toy.
Multiple evocations in literature and many representations in art testify to the banality of this equipment, originally scientific, well known to the secular public in the nineteenth century, now a museum heritage or collectible object.
Régine Fabri is a PhD in botanical sciences and holds a master’s degree in information and communication sciences from the University of Liège. In parallel with her thesis on algal vegetation as bioindicators of the quality of running water in the high Ardennes, she worked at the Hautes Fagnes Scientific Station on the ecological study and integration in the landscape of the Verviers-Prüm motorway link.
Continuing an eclectic journey, she left the University of Liège to enter, in 1982, the National Botanical Garden of Belgium, where she wrote the volume on the Umbellifères of the General Flora of Belgium. In 1993, she took over the supervision of the computerization of the catalogue of the Jardin library, before becoming head of the library from 2005 until her retirement in 2019.
Now a volunteer scientific collaborator at the Meise Botanical Garden, she has been a very active contributor to Wikipedia since the end of 2007.