The Black Herbarium: Museum of Dark Botany is an intimate, immersive experience exploring the curious, unsettling and often overlooked histories of plants and their relationship with humanity.

Hidden within herbarium specimens, curious objects and sculptural works unravel stories that have travelled through centuries.  

The journey spans historical fact and the wonderfully bizarre. Herbarium specimens become clues, leading into stories connected to battlefields, apothecaries, medical practices, crime, death and survival. Along the way, familiar plants can take on an entirely different character.

What appears beautiful may be toxic.
What was once considered medicine may now seem extraordinary.
And what was dismissed as superstition sometimes has a surprisingly complicated history.

This is not a museum of plants as you know them.

It is a journey into the shadows surrounding them.

From poisonous blooms and forgotten remedies to unconventional medicine, quackery, folklore and curious rituals, The Black Herbarium explores the ways plants have been used, feared, worshipped, traded and misunderstood.

The story behind The Black Herbarium

The museum was the brainchild of artist Janet Howkins, emerging from a 20-year artistic journey exploring preservation, transformation and the cycles of life and decay.

Her practice has encompassed preserved flowers, animals, decay, botanical forms and the fragile relationship between beauty and mortality. Alongside this has run a lifelong fascination with plants, medicine, death, antiques and oddities; a self-professed modern-day Victorian.

The Black Herbarium brings these threads together.

Janet's sculptural herbarium specimens provide the starting point, but the stories surrounding them lead much further — into historical research, medical science, toxicology, thanatology, folklore and the curious objects people have collected, preserved and passed down through generations.

Enter the collection

The Black Herbarium is part museum, part immersive artwork and part cabinet of curiosities.

Expect botanical specimens with stories to tell, strange historical connections, sculptural works, antiques, curiosities and discoveries drawn from the darker edges of history.

Nothing is quite as innocent as it first appears.

The experience is designed to be intimate and atmospheric, inviting you to look closely, question what you think you know and follow the trail from one discovery to the next.

Come curious. Leave with a different view of the natural world.​

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The museum has a maximum capacity of 4 people so advanced booking is advised as the museum runs of timed entry.

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