BackgroundBelarus is an Eastern European country, which has been little studied ethnobotanically. The aim of the study was to compare largely unpublished 19th century sources with more contemporary data on the use of wild food plants.MethodsThe information on 19th century uses is based on twelve, mainly unpublished, responses to Józef Rostafiński’s questionnaire from 1883, and the newly discovered materials of the ethnographer Michał Federowski, who structured his data according to Rostafiński’s questionnaire and documented it with voucher specimens. Rostafiński’s questionnaire was concerned mainly with Polish territories, but for historical reasons this also encompassed a large part of Belarus, and we analyzed only the twelve responses (out of the few hundred Rostafiński obtained), which concerned the present Belarus. These data were compared with a few 20th century ethnographic sources, and our own 40 interviews and questionnaires from Belarus.Results and discussion58 taxa of wild food plants used in the 19th century were identified. Some of them are still used in modern Belarus, others are probably completely forgotten. In the 19th century several species of wild greens were widely used for making soups. Apart from Rumex, other wild greens are now either forgotten or rarely used. The list of species used in the 20th and 21st century encompasses 67 taxa. Nearly half of them were mentioned by Rostafiński’s respondents. The list of fruit species has not changed much, although in the 19th century fruits were mainly eaten raw, or with dairy or floury dishes, and now apart from being eaten raw, they are incorporated in sweet dishes like jams or cakes. Modern comparative data also contain several alien species, some of which have escaped from cultivation and are gathered from a semi-wild state, as well as children's snacks, which were probably collected in the 19th century but were not recorded back then.ConclusionThe responses to Rostafiński from 1883 present extremely valuable historical material as the use of wild food plants in Belarus has since undergone drastic changes, similar to those, which have taken place in other Eastern European countries.

The aim of this article is to study the geographical distribution and historical patterns of use of a little known root crop native to Europemarsh woundwort Stachys palustris L. The species grows in wet grasslands and arable fields. It produces edible tubers. Both ethnographic literature and archival sources were searched. Seventeen reliable references concerning the consumption of S. palustris in southern and south-eastern Poland were found. The tubers were usually dried and powdered, and then added to soups or to bread dough. They were also eaten as raw snacks. The plant was used mainly during food shortages in spring, until the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and later only as an occasional raw snack until the 1970s. Marsh woundwort was also eaten in western Ukraine (one reference). There are many references to the edibility of marsh woundwort in the eighteenth and nineteenth century European economic botany literature, particularly in Sweden and Great Britain. These publications tried to popularize the use of S. palustris as food. However, there is no firm evidence from these countries that marsh woundwort was used as food there. Marsh woundwort was also used, throughout northern and central Europe, as pig fodder and as a medicinal plant, particularly for healing wounds. Further studies on the nutritive value of this forgotten crop should be undertaken, particularly that there is little knowledge of the chemical composition of both marsh woundwort and its Asian relative Stachys affinis widely cultivated in China as a vegetable.

Manna grass (mainly but not exclusively G. fluitans) used to be widely gathered in most lowland areas of the present territory of Poland and western and southern Belarus. It had an important function as a component of tribute paid to local landowners by villagers, which led to the persistence of manna gathering even when this was not sustainable for peasants themselves. Manna grass was always an expensive food due to its time consuming gathering, but appreciated for its sweet taste and often served as dessert. In the nineteenth century marshes shrank significantly and the payment of tribute disappeared from the local economy, which gradually led to the total abandonment of Glyceria use around 1914. This article provides a detailed overview of Glyceria use as food within the borders of the former PolishLithuanian Kingdom (now Poland, Lithuania, western Belarus and western Ukraine) based on archaeobotanical, historical and ethnographic sources. The evidence for the continued use of manna since at least medieval times is abundant in historical accounts and ethnographic studies, but little has been reported in archaeobotanical findings due to the relatively small amounts of Glyceria consumed.

In 1883, Polish botanist Józef Rostafiński distributed a questionnaire to Poles with knowledge of peasant culture. Rostafiński asked about the names and uses of about 130 various plants, both wild and cultivated. About 370 individuals took part in the survey, sending nearly 860 letters. Only 359, sent by 227 correspondents, are now stored at the Museum of the Jagiellonian University Botanical Garden (Kraków, Poland). These letters contain nearly 25,800 records. Despite obtaining a vast amount of information from his enquiry, Rostafiński never made full use of the data. Rostafiński's questionnaire occupies quite an early position in the history of ethnobotany. It was the most significant one at that time in regard of its size, issues included in the questions and the obtained results.

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The Herbarium of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland (KRA) has extensive collections. The Pinaceae family in KRA embraces 1,057 herbarium sheets and contains representatives of eight out of 11 genera usually distinguished in the family. The collection of the family in KRA contains ca. 54–61% of the 220–250 species occurring in the world. The most numerous species (116 sheets) is <em>Pinus sylvestris</em>. There is one isoneotypus of <em>Larix decidua</em> Mill var. <em>carpatica</em> Domin (KRA 224704) and one syntypus of <em>Tsuga caroliniana</em> Engelm. (KRA 224989) in the collection. There are 706 sheets from Europe, 504 of them come from areas covered by the contemporary borders of Poland, 206 from North America, 98 from Asia, two from Africa, and one from Australia. The herbal material of the family deposited in KRA was collected in the past 200 years. The oldest specimen was collected in 1821. There are 65 sheets which date from the nineteenth century, 56 from the years 1900 to 1918, 173 from 1919 to 1939, 532 from 1944 to 2000, and 139 sheets from the twenty-first century. The most interesting collections include: the exsiccata from the nineteenth century, sheets from China (1925–1926), sheets collected by various Russian expeditions to Siberia, the collection of Professors Jan Kornaś and Anna Medwecka-Kornaś from North America, and collections documenting the scientific activity of the “Kraków geobotanical school” in the twentieth century.

plants of his time, after spending several years on expeditions to Central and South America, was to be employed as Inspector (the main gardener) of the Botanical Garden of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His employment encountered resistance from the Ministry of Denominations and Education Kraków in 1854. He worked on the reorganisation of the Botanical Garden and supervised new projects there. His activities contributed to an expansion of the Botanical Garden's plant collections. Warszewicz also brought a herbarium and a collection of tropical animals to Kraków. During his life in Kraków, Warszewicz was widely honoured, and after his death, a monument was erected to him and one of Kraków's streets was named after him.

The university in Vilna (Lithuanian: Vilnius), now Vilniaus universitetas, founded in 1579 by Stefan Batory (Stephen Báthory), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, was a centre of Polish botany in 1780-1832 and 1919-1939. The Botanic Garden established by Jean-Emmanuel Gilibert (1741–1814) in 1781 (or, actually, from 1782) survived the loss of independence by Poland (1795), and a later closure of the University (1832), and it continued to function until 1842, when it was shut down by Russian authorities. After Poland had regained independence and the University was reopened as the Stefan Batory University (SBU), its Botanic Garden was established on a new location (1919, active since 1920). It survived as a Polish institution until 1939. After the Second World War, as a result of changed borders, it found itself in the Soviet Union, and from 1990 – in the Republic of Lithuania. A multidisciplinary research project has been recently launched with the aim to create a publication on the history of science at the Stefan Batory University. The botanical part of the project includes, among others, drafting the history of the Botanic Garden. Obtaining electronic copies of archival documents, e.g. annual reports written by the directors, enabled a more thorough analysis of the Garden’s history. Piotr Wiśniewski (1884–1971), a plant physiologist, nominated as Professor in the Department of General Botany on 1 June 1920, was the organiser and the first director of the Garden. He resigned from his post in October 1923, due to financial problems of the Garden. From October 1923 to April 1924, the management was run by the acting director, Edward Bekier (1883–1945), Professor in the Department of Physical Chemistry, Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. For 13 subsequent years, i.e. from 1 May 1924 to 30 April 1937, the directorship of the Garden was held by Józef Trzebiński (1867–1941), a mycologist and one of the pioneers of phytopathology in Poland, Head of the Department of Botany II (Agricultural Botany), renamed in 1926 as the Department of Plant Taxonomy, and in 1937 – the Department of Taxonomy and Geography of Plants. From May 1937 to 1939, his successor as director was Franciszek Ksawery Skupieński (1888–1962), a researcher of slime moulds. Great credit for the development of the Garden is due to the Inspector, i.e. Chief Gardener, Konstanty Prószyński (Proszyński) (1859–1936) working there from 1919, through his official nomination in 1920, until his death. He was an amateur-naturalist, a former landowner, who had lost his property. Apart from the work on establishing and maintaining the Garden’s collection, as well as readying seeds for exchange, he published one mycological paper, and prepared a manuscript on fungi, illustrated by himself, containing descriptions of the new species. Unfortunately, this work was not published for lack of funds, and the prepared material was scattered. Some other illustrations of flowering plants drawn by Prószyński survived. There were some obstacles to the further development of the institution, namely substantially inadequate funds as well as too few members of the personnel (1–3 gardeners, and 1–3 seasonal workers). The area of the Garden, covering approx. 2 hectares was situated on the left bank of the Neris river (Polish: Wilia). It was located on sandy soils of a floodplain, and thus liable to flooding. These were the reasons for the decision taken in June 1939 to move the Garden to a new site but the outbreak of the Second World War stood in the way. Despite these disadvantageous conditions, the management succeeded in setting up sections of plants analogous to these established in other botanical gardens in Poland and throughout the world, i.e. general taxonomy (1922), native flora (1922), psammophilous plants (1922), cultivated plants (1924/1925), plant ecology (1927/1928), alpinarium (1927–1929), high-bog plants (1927–1929), and, additionally – in the 1920s – the arboretum, as well as sections of aquatic and bog plants. A glasshouse was erected in 1926–1929 to provide room for plants of warm and tropical zones. The groups representing the various types of vegetation illustrated the progress in ecology and phytosociology in the science of the period (e.g. in the ecology section, the Raunkiaer’s life forms were presented). The number of species grown increased over time, from 1,347 in 1923/1924 to approx. 2,800 in 1936/1937. Difficult weather conditions – the severe winter of 1928 as well as the snowless winter and the dry summer of 1933/34 contributed to the reduction of the collections. The ground collections, destroyed by flood in spring of 1931, were restored in subsequent years. Initially, the source of plant material was the wild plant species collected during field trips. Many specimens were also obtained from other botanical gardens, such as Warsaw and Cracow (Kraków). Beginning from 1923, printed catalogues of seeds offered for exchange were published (cf. the list on p. ... ). Owing to that, the Garden began to participate in the national and international plant exchange networks. From its inception, the collection of the Garden was used for teaching purposes, primarily to the students of the University, as well as for the botanical education of schoolchildren and the general public, particularly of the residents of Vilna. Scientific experiments on phytopathology were conducted on the Garden’s plots. After Vilna was incorporated into Lithuania in October 1939, the Lithuanian authorities shut down the Stefan Batory University, thus ending the history of the Polish Botanic Garden. Its area is now one of the sections of the Vilnius University Botanic Garden (“Vingis” section – Vilniaus universiteto botanikos sodas). In 1964, its area was extended to 7.35 hectares. In 1974, after establishing the new Botanic Garden in Kairenai to the east of Vilnius, the old Garden lost its significance. Nevertheless, it still serves the students and townspeople of Vilnius, and its collections of flowering plants are often used to decorate and grace the university halls during celebrations.