Taxononmy embodied: a brief history of classification spaces

In its commonplace meaning, the Herbarium is a collection of dried and labelled plants assembled for purposes of knowledge and classification. Its historic origins are set in late Renaissance Italy when physician and scholar Luca Ghini began to establish the first known “hortus siccus” (dried garden) as a systematic collection of known species. This brief essay provides an insight into the origins of the Herbarium and the road to the emancipation of taxonomy from spatial constraints, relating it to places of classification, storage and access to knowledge: the library, the archive and the museum.