Western oakfern

Manx National Heritage transferred this herbarium sheet to RAMM in 2023 as part of a collections review. Talbot was a Wesleyan Methodist minister in Douglas on the Isle of Man. Later he left the Methodist ministry and eventually became an Anglican priest.

He married well and retried early and followed his passion for history. An obituary in Manx Quarterly states, ‘He was probably the highest authority on questions of Manx history and archaeology, and he was frequently occupied in exposing errors made by writers upon these subjects. Indeed it must be admitted that Mr Talbot ruthlessly destroyed some of the most cherished Manx traditions — in his zeal for historical accuracy he was a perfect iconoclast. A man of scholarly attainments and wide reading, he was a living example of his favourite definition of a man of culture — he knew something about everything and everything about something.’

His interest in botany was fleeting but even so his herbarium is the earliest reasonably representative collection of the island’s vascular plants. The Manx Museum has retained the specimens collected on the Isle of Man, specimens from other locations are distributed to museums in the relevant counties.