Un herbier-monde :

Avec une contribution de Fred Stauffer

Préface : Yann Sordet

Frontispice : Annie Bocel, Asplenium, eau forte et aquatinte.

This book was completed on September 3, 2025 at the Bortolazzi Press in Verona.

1,230 copies were printed.

The first thirty numbered copies, from I to XXX, are augmented with an original etching and aquatint by Annie Bocel, numbered and signed by the artist.

The exceptional "botanical museum" assembled by Benjamin Delessert (1773-1847) arose from the immense curiosity of a collector, a personal passion for plant collecting, and a generous and pioneering scientific spirit. Delessert devoted his fortune to gathering plant specimens from every continent and compiling the entirety of botanical knowledge within a herbarium spanning the globe and a vast specialized library, open to current research as well as ancient, medieval, and modern sources. Within this unparalleled dual collection, space and time would thus be abolished, and knowledge would be aggregated.

Having grown up in an environment committed to philanthropic ideas and the Enlightenment, he had assigned a mission to this vast undertaking. In the field of botany, profoundly renewed at the turn of the 19th century by the strengthening of the geography of species, the controversies of systematics and the beginnings of ecology, he intended to serve science and its actors, to offer them a repository, a powerful instrument of documentation, but also technical and financial resources to facilitate expeditions and publications.

This book examines the development, scope, and uses of this vast collection. It explores the cultural and ethical framework that underpinned this visionary project, and the role played by the greatest scholars of his time. Now housed in Paris and Geneva, Delessert's "botanical museum" also serves as a tool for research driven by the challenges of preserving and restoring biodiversity.