Overview
John Lovis was Professor of Botany and head of Botany department at Canterbury University for many years. He led regular student trips to the Cass field station and other parts of the South Island and collected intensively from the plant groups he was researching or just interested in.
But his first trip to New Zealand was in 1955-1956 when as a young PhD student from Leeds University, John and his wife spent a year travelling the length of the country. His one year fellowship included visiting many botanists and joining them on field trips. He collected a specimen of about 75% of the native fern species – apparently with a view to donating them to the British Museum. For some reason this didn’t come about and when the family later emigrated to New Zealand the carefully dried, pressed specimens came with him.
After his death in 2017, his daughter donated his whole collection to Te Papa. The earlier collections were still pressed in the old newspapers from the 1950s and many of the later ones were in 1980s Christchurch Star newspapers. The staff at Te Papa have checked and updated all his identifications, registered all 3250 specimens in the Te Papa database with the collection information, and mounted the specimens on archival card. These have now been imaged and can be seen below.
These collections have been a valuable addition to the Te Papa Herbarium and where extra duplicate specimens were collected, they have been donated to other herbaria across New Zealand.