OVER the years Bolton has had its fair share of benefactors who have left important work behind to be appreciated by visitors to Bolton Museum and Art Gallery.

Several of these amateur though serious collectors were interested in botany and over their lifetimes gathered and left behind important botanical collections.

Now, in our latest in the series, Hidden Treasures, we take a look at the work of the men who collected local and other botanical items which are generally kept in storage at the museum and not available to see, without appointment, by the general public.

The samples are used by botanists and other experts and are also seen by schoolchildren as part of the curriculum.

The museum's keeper of botany, Patricia Francis, said that an important collector, Thomas Greenlees, was born in Bolton in 1865.

She said: "He was a leather worker and an active botanist in his spare time and he was founder of the Bolton Botanical Society in 1895, which became the Bolton Field Naturalists Society in 1907. He published The Flora of Bolton in 1920 with Thomas Holden.

"He collected specimens of flowering plants and ferns between 1889 and 1937 and donated about 1,500 herbarium specimens to the museum."

Mr Greenlees died in 1949. Another was James Sims who collected mosses in the Bolton area from 1882 to 1898. Little is known about him other than he was a French polisher by trade and that he was president of the Bolton Labour Church and an enthusiastic botanical rambler. Bolton Museum has 300 of his specimens, which were donated in 1898.

Flowering plants and ferns are the largest section of the herbarium, comprising more than 25,000 specimens.

Patricia said: "Most of this total came from the purchase of the herbarium of Dr. Philip Brookes Mason for the museum in 1907. Dr. Mason had his own museum in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, where he died in 1905.

"The Mason collection has a wide geographic coverage with specimens from 99 counties which reflects the travels and gatherings of Mason himself and the collections which he acquired from other botanists of the period - collectors such as John Gilbert Baker, Frederick Janson Hanbury and John Thomas Harris."

The Mason collection also contains several significant sections with gatherings from the earlier part of the 19th century, for example those of the Rev. William Higgins Coleman, John Thomas Irvine Syme, Charles Ottley Groom Napier, John Percy, Hewett Cottrell Watson, John Hutton Balfour, the Rev Andrew Bloxam and Andrew Kerr.

Others include a small collection made by Edward Jacob (1710-1788), that of Mr A Williamson of Bolton purchased 1912, and those of the Rev Herbert Mann Livens (1860-1946) donated in 1945.

A significant early donation of 500 Lancashire and Cheshire botanical specimens came from Miss F S Bennett of Bolton in 1896.

There is a small but important local collection of brambles by Thomas Midgley, who was curator of Bolton Museum, and another significant local collection comprises the 1,500 specimens from the Bolton district collected by Thomas Greenlees. Greenlees was the co-author of The Flora of Bolton (1920) with Thomas Kay Holden.

Another important collection with significant local specimens is that of Professor Brian William Fox of about 700 specimens donated to the museum in 1984.