For those interested, you can search through the collections of herbariums all over north America through portals such as the Consortium of Midwest Herbaria[0], in Europe through digHerb [1], and throughout the rest of the world through many other symbiota portals [2].
You can find your nearest brick and mortar herbarium globally through Index Herbariorum[3]. Though these resources are incomplete, they are pretty extensive regardless.
[0]https://midwestherbaria.org/portal/collections/search/index....
[1]https://digiherb.symbiota.org/
Also for those in the States, contact your local state University extension office. They know of local resources like this that aren't widely advertised/don't have an online presence.
It is very important that we treat the natural world like data that needs a backup. The environment changes so fast that we will lose the history of these plants if we do not save them in a digital format. This collection gives us a way to check the past against the future so we can see what has been lost.
Neat to see doi implemented as intended, where identifiers link to items that not articles.
Not a very user friendly website IMHO. Surprised it doesn't list the Irish language names of many of these plants (as far as I could see).
scientifically the only names that matter are the botanic binomials (ICN or ICNafp)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Nomencla...
I was specifically interested in the Irish names, because they are related to some research I have been doing for a number of years.
The Latin names are available in numerous other sources.
Scientifically, communication matters. Therefore, other names do also matter.
All other names are generally considered either common or historic. Common names are regarded as too ambiguous for scientific use, they are generally only mentioned in relevance to collections such as "How do the local people in <area x> having <population y> of <latin name z> (who might help identify where it is growing) refer to the organism?". In a small number of cases local names confer ethnobotanical or cultural semantics.
I am well aware that laypeople don't always distinguish between various similar species of plants and animals, and I probably can't in some cases myself, but I am specifically interested in some of those "common or historic names" along with their "ethnobotanical or cultural semantics", to see how they might compare with words elsewhere.