Our final stop on this year's journey was the Berlin Herbarium and Berlin Botanical Garden. The herbarium houses an excellent collection of Camelina, including many rare type specimens. Here we gained an appreciation for how our collections fit into the diversity of Camelina specimens collected by others throughout the world. In addition, we saw two species for the very first time: Camelina anomala and C. stiefelhagenii.
Jordan examines Camelina anomala for the first time. This is a very rare species of Camelina that was last collected over one hundred years ago!
C. anomala is unique among Camelina species in that it has elongated fruit pods. This trait is could potentially increase seed yields since fruits are larger, but unfortunately our efforts to collect this species from the regions where it was originally documented have thus far been fruitless. We got to see this type specimen at the Berlin Herbarium.
Another rare Camelina collection was found at the Berlin Herbarium. Camelina stiefelhagenii is an interesting plant with an even more interesting story. It was collected in a garbage dump in Dresden during 1938. The specimen came with many hand written letters and postcards detailing Stiefelhagen's findings.
The Berlin Botanical Gardens was a treat! Exhibits were based on geographies, even the Caucasus region was represented in the gardens. We found numerous Brassicaceae species dotted throughout these recreated landscapes.
Remnants of the Berlin wall with the dead-zone separating East and West Berlin.