CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND INFORMATION
According to clamber land (1994), herbarium can simply be defined as a collection of dried, preserved and pressed plant specimens which are arranged systematically, serving as a taxonomic reference of plants for their identification and classification. He further defines it as a repository of preserved and labeled plant specimen to allow easy access and archival storage. The herbarium is useful for research identification of plants and for comparison of materials with previous collection. It is also a growing source of knowledge about the vegetation of an area. Its effectiveness and value depend on the care with which the specimens are preserved, mounted, completeness of identifications, labeling, satisfactory arrangement and maintenance of the collection. Dried and mounted specimens are stored in cabinets with tight fitting doors. The storage cabinet is provided with partitions in which the families of plants may be arranged in alphabetical order or (more usually) in some presumed phylogenetic order. The specimens are typically in form of herbarium sheets, pressed and dried plants have been glued to a sheet of heavy paper, together with a labeled data. The label describes useful information, which include the plants Latin name, the origin of the collection, the data of collection, and the name of the collector. Within the cabinet, the specimens are arranged according to the family, genes and species they represent, as well as the geographic location from which they were collected.