I think I can provide a perspective on the issue of provenance from the standpoint of both a private collector (with a special interest in geophytes) and a botanical garden for which the issue at hand is especially important. First, I would agree that botanical gardens in general do not take the issue of provenance seriously and most do not have a provenance requirement for their collection. It is also not easy to get data on this issue, although in a major survey I did last year for the 20 largest collections in N. America, the major gardens could provide relatively good data on the percent of their accessions with provenance. The results (which I can make available to anyone interested) show that these collections are largely without provenance. In fact, the UC Botanical Garden stands out as the largest, most diverse, collection in N. America, with about 65-70% of our 20,000 accessions, 10,000 species, having some kind of provenance. In fact, this relatively strict collecting policy does hinder the acquisition of new material; e.g., we not only require provenance but material must be legally collected. We do under special circumstances, deviate from our policy; namely, when we receive extremely valuable/rare material via confiscation; we are plant rescue center and have obtained many rare orchids, carnivorous plants and cycads via this route. The issue of provenance is a bit tricky under these circumstances, but often the material has such a restricted distribution that we can get close. Allow me to address a few other concerns that have been raised 1. the issue of long term maintenance is real, and yes, new directors can make major changes. Since UCBG is intended as a research and education as well as a public collection, the collection is less vulnerable; our collection has been relatively stable over the 100 years. 2. We do not focus on usual plants. While we have over 2000 endangered species and accept especially rare material as discussed, they are not necessarily the focus of acquisition.In fact, since we maintain a global collection with an intent to display naturalistic assemblages, common species are valuable. 3. We do attempt to make material freely available to the public by propagating from seeds or cuttings. In fact, these sales are important for the financial support of the collection (which is why I cannot offer more for the PBS exchange). Incidentally, our own policy prevents use of our seed for building the collection since the seed is not directly from a wild population source. There are limitations on providing material to the public based on international conventions controlling material from certain countries. 4. Only rarely do we limit access to our provenance data. This most commonly occurs with some of the extremely endangered native California species that we work with; we are required to limit these data by regulation. 5. Finally, to address Michael Homicks question about what constitutes provenance, there is no single answer. Minimally, we define having provenance as being wild-collected. I think precise geographical data (e.g., GPS coordinates) would be the most valuable, but only rarely available. Rather, we strive for some level of geographical detail, e.g., xx miles from some recognized 'marker' in some country. One might also question how valid such data are, especially when provided by an 'unknown' collector. Again, we need to make it clear that while vegetative offsets of a wild-collected plant are acceptable, we do not use seed produced 'in captivity'. There are many more details that need be discussed but I hope this gives an overview. Paul Licht, Director Univ. California Botanical Garden 200 Centennial Drive Berkeley, CA 94720 (510)-643-8999 http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/ _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.ibiblio.org http://pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/