By Neus Nualart, Museu Ciencies Naturals Barcelona (Institut Botànic de Barcelona)
LMS is the acronym of a large collection of 100,000 plant specimens preserved in the reserves of Le Musée Vert of Le Mans (Fig. 1). As its curator, Nicolas Morel, explains to me, the main part of the herbarium contains plants collected in the Sarthe region by local botanists. In 2017 the catalogue of all the collections from the Sarthe region was published with a description of each collection (more information of this project is available online, HerbEnLoire). According to this catalogue there are 65 herbarium collections preserved in Le Musée Vert with plants collected between the 18th and 20th centuries. The largest collection is the one of Monguillon with 17,150 specimens of cryptogam plants which was, in part, studied by my colleague Neus Ibáñez during her stay in Le Mans (a report is available in the SciCoMove blog).

Since one of my research fields is the nomenclature of plants and the typification of new names (to stabilize their interpretation), I was interested in finding some original material in LMS herbarium. In one of my visits to the reserves, two post-it notes included in the Chevallier collection with the indication of type material caught my attention (Fig. 2). Nicolas Morel told me that they were duplicates of specimens of the National Museum of Paris where the holotypes (original material used by an author to describe a new taxon) were preserved. This collection was formed by a bundle of 107 specimens collected between 1898 and 1904 in Algeria. My interest of North African plants encouraged me to learn more about this author and the taxa he published.

Louis Pierre Désiré Chevallier (Melicorne, Sarthe, 1852–Précigné, Sarthe, 1938) was a French clergyman and botanist who worked as a professor. Although his main herbarium was from plants collected in Sarthe, his naturalist interests and his curiosity for the exploration brought him to study the flora of Algeria, a French colony in that time, where he carried out different trips between 1879 and 1904 (Fig. 3). During all his life he collected 50,000 specimens in a herbarium organized in more than 600 volumes. According to the African Plant Database (https://africanplantdatabase.ch/) he proposed ca. 30 new taxa including species, subspecies and varieties. He published three notes about Saharan Flora in 1900, 1903 and 1905 explaining the trips and describing the new taxa he found. He also created an exsiccata to distribute 650 plants in different herbaria and botanists from the entire world, the “Plantae Saharae-algeriensis”.

Two specimens labeled as types corresponds to Helianthemum brachypodum that was described by Chevallier in page 767 of his “Deuxième note sur la Flore du Sahara” (Chevallier, 1903) but without mentioning any locality or date. In page 678 he explained that he found this new species in Oum-el-Klab on 19th March 1902. In JSTOR portal web (https://plants.jstor.org/) there are many specimens indicated as type or original material tough collected in 1904; they were distributed by Chevallier in the exsiccate “Plantae Saharae-algeriensis” with the number 543. Only two specimens in JSTOR are actually the original material collected in 1902 (P00086041, P00086042) and preserved in the National Museum of Paris. Both are part of a single collection, one bearing the original label handwritten by Chevallier (Fig. 4) and the other with a transcription of this original one.

The two specimens conserved in Le Musée Vert were also handwritten by Chevallier and were collected in Oum-el-Klab on 19th March 1902 (Fig. 5). It is surprising to me that these specimens have less information than the ones preserved in P herbarium, maybe because the former remained in Chevalier’s personal collection for a long time.

The other specimen labeled as type corresponds to Salvia pseudojaminiana, which was described by Chevallier from Hadadra and collected on 10th April 1904 (Chevallier, 1905). This specimen was distributed in the exsiccate “Plantae Saharae-algeriensis” with the number 602 as it is indicated in the original publication (Fig. 6).

In JSTOR portal web (https://plants.jstor.org/) there are different specimens indicated as original material and preserved in Jena (Germany), Leiden (the Netherlands), Madrid (Spain), Montpellier (France), Washington (USA) and Melbourne (Australia); all of them bear the label of the exsiccate, either handwritten or typewritten (Fig. 7).

In contrast, the specimen preserved in Le Musée Vert of Salvia pseudojaminiana has a handwritten label with only some information about the locality and the date of collection (Fig. 8). As in the case of the original specimen of Helianthemum brachypodum it seems that this specimen was included in his personal collection.

A review of all 107 specimens that compose the Chevallier collection of Le Musée Vert has allowed me to find some original material of some varieties described by this author in Algeria. Six specimens are type material of the following names: Artemisia judaica var. sahariensis, Chrysanthemum macrocarpum var. aureum, Fagonia latifolia var. pinguis, Lippia nodiflora var. suborbicularis, Mentha rotundifolia var. longispicata, and Retama raetam var. pallens.
Although none of these names are accepted today (except Salvia pseudojaminiana), their study is necessary to improve the knowledge about the taxonomy of Algerian plants. Moreover, none of the names proposed by Chevallier for Algerian plants have been studied yet from a typification point of view. Therefore, all original material of this author is important to understand his interpretation for the new taxa he described. In short, the material found in Le Musée Vert can be of great interest of taxonomists interested in North African flora.
References
Chevallier, L. 1903. Deuxième note sur la flora du Sahara. Bull. Herb. Boiss., sér. 2, 3: 669–684.
Chevallier, L. 1905. Troisième note sur la flora du Sahara. Bull. Herb. Boiss., sér. 2, 5: 440–444.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (December 19, 2022). The pursuit of interesting specimens in the LMS herbarium. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved March 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twtn