Accessioning and labelling

To keep track of individual plants in your National Plant Collection, they each need an 'accession number' 

All National Plant Collections need to provide an accessioned plant list. This is a list of the plants in your collection, detailing their botanical (Latin) name, accession number, the date you got them and where you got them from. 

An accession number is a unique identifying number, or code, which can be used to track it through your collection. Information about the plant can then be attached to this accession number, such as legal paperwork, pictures, characterisation data or plant health issues.

You can use a simple system (0001 and so on), although this can get hard to maintain as you add more plants to your collection. So quite often this number is combined with the year you got it (e.g. 2019-0001). This tells you when you received the plant, so you can keep track of a plant's age in your collection. For a more in depth look at different ways of accessioning plants in a collection, see this document.

The best way to order and store all of the information that you will start to gather about your plants is in a database - see the pages on Plant Recording and the Persephone database.

Accession Policy

An accession policy describes how you decide which plants to add to your collection, and which plants you do not. It should be relevant to your collection category and scope. An example of an accession policy for a collection of Heuchera cultivars (1990-2010) could be: ‘to obtain all cultivars bred between the stated years, commencing with those originating in the UK, then those in the USA’.

It can be used to indicate current priorities or future direction: ‘to obtain all cultivars bred between the stated years, and once complete to look at the practicality of adding 1980-1990 to the collection’.

Sources

The accession number will link the plant to its source. It is important to keep information about the source as this can prove that you have the plant legally (in the case of species sourced either directly or indirectly from the wild). You may have examples of the same taxa from multiple sources and it is important have this recorded. Should there turn out to be a problem with one of the plants (such as being misnamed or a pest and disease issue), you will know which source it came from.

Labelling

You should add the accession number to the plant label. We recommend using two labels for each plant, in case one gets lost (for example, one buried in the pot/ground and one that can be read by you when you walk past). Some collection holders are using Near Field Communications tags, which can be read by a smartphone, to digitally label their plants. More details in this article on the collection holder's blog.