The Society has an extensive herbarium of specimens, predominantly of British Lichens. Follow link to the list of species in the BLS herbarium

Members of the Society are welcome to borrow specimens from this reference Herbarium. This service is particularly useful for beginners wishing to get to know macro-lichens. Specimens preferably in batches of 10 - 20 packets can be borrowed by post by sending a list of species desired, together with an address label, to the [Curator] at Dundee Museums & Art Galleries, who manages the BLS collection.

Loans should be returned within one month, enclosing postage reimbursement usually not more than £2.

If you would like to check whether specimens you would like to borrow are available, please email [BLS Herbarium Curator]

The British Lichen Herbarium of the Natural History Museum is the largest, and arguably the best, collection of British and Irish lichens in the world. It consists of about 78,000 specimens including at least 2,000 types. Included are important historical collections, such as material collected by J.M. Crombie, U. Duncan, O. Gilbert, P.W. James, W.A. Leighton, W. Mudd, T. Salwey, J. Stirton and D. Turner.

It should be noted here that the Natural History Museum does not keep collections of non-lichenized ascomycete or basidiomycete fungi; all the material was transferred to Kew Botanical Gardens as a permanent loan (Brenan & Ross 1970). Link to Literature. There is still a collection of myxomycetes, however.

A link to a list of lichen species represented in the British Lichen Herbarium of the Natural History Museum (BM) is given (last update: 14 January 2008). This list was compiled by Scott LaGreca & Amanda Waterfield. Nomenclature follows the online checklist by Coppins (Coppins 2007), and numbers after species names are the species numbers in the Coppins Checklist.

Entries in normal font are present in the British Lichen Herbarium. Entries in italics are not yet present (if you have a good specimen of any of the italicised species, please send it to the Lichen Curator at BM, Department of Botany, the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD UK).

Please note that although this list includes related non-lichen fungi (indicated as '#' and '##'), they are not yet fully integrated into the British Lichen Herbarium. However, many are held at Kew (K).