Botanical drawingWe are continuing to make progress on the development of a new collection inspired by Global Plants, which will include a set of journals, books, and over 100,000 primary source objects ranging from nursery catalogues to expedition maps and records of medicinal plants. Whereas Global Plants was developed for plant taxonomists who needed to access the type specimens critical to their work—Plants & Society is intended to serve a broader audience: scholars, researchers and students from a wider range of disciplines across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, including Anthropology, Art & Architecture, Botany & Plant Sciences, Ecology, Economics, Garden History & Design, History of Science, Horticulture, and Landscape Architecture.

Plants & Society will be a center to bring together researchers from various academic backgrounds to approach a unified set of issues around plants and their economic and social uses. In general, there is a growing recognition in the academy of the need to create more and better pathways among the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, and we believe that the study of the relationship between plants and society can be one interesting model of that. We have begun acquiring content for the collection from some of our Global Plants Network partners, including the Harvard University Herbaria,  New York Botanical Garden, Oak Spring Foundation, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (Australia). We plan to launch the collection in late 2017.