Under mentioned is the list of some major herbaria of the world, along with the number of their specimen holdings as worked out by Holmgren et al. (1981):
1. Museum of Natural History, Paris…………………………………………………………………………. 10million
2. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew……………………………… 6 million
3. Komarov Botanical Institute Leningrad……………………………………………………………….. 5.7 million
4. Conservatory and Botanical Garden, Geneva……………………………………………………… 5 million
5. Combined Herbaria, Harvard University, Cambridge……………………………………….. 5 million
6. New York Botanical Garden, Bronx……………………………………………………………………… 5 million
7. U.S. National Herbarium, Washington……………………….. 4.1 million
8. British Museum of Natural History, London……………….. 4 million
9. Natural History Museum, Vienna………………………………………………………………………… 3.5 million
10. Missouri Botanical Garden, Saint Louis………………… 2 .1million
11. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago…………………………………………………………. 2.1 million
12. National Botanical Garden of Belgium, Brussels……….. 2.1 million
13. Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum, Berlin………. 2 million
14. Academy of Natural Science, Philadelphia………………… 2 million
15. Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh…………………………… 1.7 million
However, the latest estimates show that in India, there exist two more herbaria having more than a million specimens.
According to Tiagi and Kshetrapal (1988) these are:
(1) The Central National Herbarium, Indian Botanical Gardens, Calcutta (2,500,000 specimens), and
(2) Herbarium of the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun (1,500,000 specimens).