How did a 200 year old receipt from a French bakery end up in the Herbarium of Trinity College Dublin? Trinity researchers who were working to catalogue plants specimens in the School of Natural Sciences were intrigued to find that instead of traditional mounting paper, a resourceful botanist had instead used a page from a bakery account book in the early 1800s, to press a sample of an orchid from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The receipt details purchases from “Le Citoyen Fourier Comptable”, a moniker steeped in revolutionary symbolism. That connection - between post-revolutionary France, the study of botany and our 21st century researchers, marks this find out as just one fascinating slice of history that can be found within the half a million-strong collection of plants, algae, and fungi in the Trinity College Dublin Herbarium. Of course, the collections are not just an important historical archive, they are an active research resource regularly used by students and r...