Crépin’s Roses from the NHM in Vienna

François Crépin (1830-1903) was a Belgian self-taught botanist and rose-specialist. He was born in Rochefort, an area that was among the botanically richest parts of Belgium. He started to show interest in botany from an early age, and as a young boy he received private tuition from teacher and naturalist Romain Beaujean.

In 1860 he published his “Manuel de la Flore de Belgique” https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.9793. This flora was the result of his botanical exploration and study from the previous decade. Five editions were published, with numerous reprints. Until the mid-1930s, it remained the Belgian standard flora for both amateurs and academics.

In 1869, he published the first part of “Primitiae Monographiae Rosarum” https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.15430, a series of building blocks for the world monograph which he intended to write. Crépin gradually built up a huge herbarium of roses, which he would later donate to the State Botanic Garden in Meise near Brussels.

Toward the end of his career, his herbarium of roses included more than 40,000 collections, plus thousands of sheets on loan from botanists and botanical institutions all over the world. He estimated that he had received some 100,000 collections for revision and comment, which were afterwards returned to their collectors or institutions.

François Crépin died in 1903, without completing his world monograph on roses. Through DoeDat, we invite citizen scientists to help the Natural History Museum of Vienna with the transcription of Crépin’s specimen labels data, in order to contribute to the digitization of his collection to make it accessible to researchers and rose enthusiasts.

The campaign is part of the European TETTRIs project https://tettris.eu/, which aims at a profound change in the role of taxonomy in biodiversity knowledge.