A lost collection

 

 

 

A handful of grains

This was a collection of seeds of all kinds (flowers, trees, endemic or rare, wild or cultivated),
accumulated during meetings, and "rare finds" made during fifty years of work in seeds.
This collection was used for the first digitisation tests. It was an interesting way to present it.

After a number of scan and download tests,
hundreds of paper bags (about 1,500) bearing scientific and vernacular names,
tidied into plastic boxes, were set aside. Everything fitted in one big travel bag.
At that time, working on the collection was not a priority.

... and what's left of it

During a somewhat brutal move, the boxes opened and mixed.
Before we noticed it, they were stored for several years in bad conditions.
A perfect situation for a "huge" food moth accident.
The small paper bags were not only insufficient protection, but were themselves attacked by the larvae.
The disaster was discovered (too late) when resuming scans.
Thinking that everything was lost, everything was (too quickly) thrown away in vexation.

But for a few hundred samples, there was one scan per sample,
at a variable magnification depending on the grain (10x10 or 20x20 image).
The scale can vary (the millimeter ruled paper is the only reference)
and the sharpness of the scanner used at the time is less good.
Despite these limitations, the grain images of this lost collection still deserved their place here.