Before Saudi Arabia had universities, herbaria or national floras, it already had botanists.
They did not necessarily use Latin names, press specimens onto archival sheets or publish peer-reviewed papers. But farmers, healers, pastoralists and travellers knew which plants signalled grazing after rain, which cured illness, which marked water, which endured drought, and which followed particular soils, wadis and mountain slopes. The history of botany in Saudi Arabia, therefore, does not begin with the arrival of European explorers. It begins with a far older relationship between people, plants and landscape.
Knowledge before collection
One of the earliest landmarks is Kitāb al-Nabāt, or Book of Plants, compiled around 895 CE by the Arab scholar Abū Ḥanīfa al-Dīnawarī. The work brought together plant names, agricultural knowledge, medicinal uses and linguistic traditions, including information associated with Arabic and Persian plant knowledge. It is not a flora of Saudi Arabia in the modern sense, but it demonstrates that plants were already being observed, classified and discussed within sophisticated knowledge traditions long before modern taxonomy reached the Arabian Peninsula.
This matters because histories of science can easily imply that knowledge begins when it is converted into a European-style specimen or book. In Arabia, plant knowledge was embedded in daily life: in pastoral movement, food, medicine, agriculture, trade and survival in dry environments. It was practical, local and cumulative.
Later medieval geographical writers, including al-Idrīsī and Abū al-Fidāʾ, also contributed to an environmental record of the region. Their works were not botanical surveys, but they described places, routes, productive landscapes and natural resources. They belong to the history of how Arabia’s environments were understood, even if they should not be confused with systematic floristic research.[ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws]
Explorers and fragmented records
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries introduced a different kind of botanical evidence: dried specimens, external taxonomic systems, museum collections and printed travel accounts. Yet the early story is not one of comprehensive discovery. It is one of uneven access.
Collectors travelled where trade, pilgrimage, diplomacy, military activity and shipping routes took them. The Red Sea coast, Yemen, southern Arabia, the Hejaz, the Gulf and the routes between Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia were more accessible than the interior. Their collections were shaped by where they could travel, what they could carry and which plants they considered unusual or scientifically valuable.
Pehr Forsskål’s Flora Aegyptiaco-Arabica, published in 1775 after his death, became an important early botanical landmark for Arabia. His work drew attention to the distinctive plant life of Egypt and Arabia and later provided a taxonomic reference point for subsequent researchers. Its geographical scope extended beyond present-day Saudi Arabia, but it showed the emerging value of specimen-based regional botany.
By the nineteenth century, explorers and collectors such as Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, Pierre Martin Rémi Aucher-Éloy, Georg Wilhelm Schimper, Carl Georg Theodor Kotschy, James Raymond Wellsted, Lewis Pelly, Isaac Bayley Balfour, Georg Schweinfurth and Albert Deflers had expanded the documentary record. However, their contribution should be described with care. The modern Saudi flora history notes that many of these collectors left limited extensive field records for broad parts of the Peninsula, particularly in areas north of Sa‘dah in Yemen.
Their legacy is nevertheless significant. They transformed some local observations into transportable evidence: labelled plant specimens that could circulate between Kew, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and other European institutions. They also laid foundations for later regional syntheses, even when their collecting was geographically fragmented and their interpretations were shaped by external scientific priorities.
From travellers to floras
The nineteenth-century ambition to synthesise scattered collections is represented by Pierre Edmond Boissier’s Flora Orientalis. Published between 1867 and 1884, with a supplement in 1888, it covered a vast area from Greece and Egypt eastward towards India. Saudi Arabia was not its central focus, but the work created a taxonomic framework within which Arabian specimens could be interpreted.
Later, Ethelbert Blatter’s Flora Arabica, issued in parts from 1919 to 1936, attempted a more specifically Arabian synthesis. It was an important milestone because it treated the Peninsula as a meaningful floristic region rather than merely a margin of Egypt, the Levant, Persia or India. Yet it also reflected the limits of available evidence. Much of its foundation lay in collections held in European museums, and botanical coverage remained far stronger for southern Arabia and Yemen than for many areas that now form Saudi Arabia.
This is the central tension in the early history. The explorers made Arabia more visible to international botany, but their records did not yet constitute a national botanical knowledge system. There were specimens, names, routes and regional compilations, but not a dense, locally maintained network of surveys, herbaria, floras and trained researchers.
The Saudi botanical turn
The decisive transformation began in the mid-twentieth century, when botanical study shifted from occasional external exploration towards Saudi-based scientific infrastructure.
King Saud University, founded in 1957, became a major platform for higher education and scientific research. By the 1960s, botanical fieldwork was increasingly being organised through Saudi universities and government bodies. The establishment of the King Saud University Herbarium in 1965 was especially consequential. A herbarium is not just a plant archive: it allows records to be checked, species identifications to be revised, distributions to be mapped, and botanical knowledge to accumulate across generations.
The growth of this infrastructure changed the purpose of botanical work. Plants were no longer only objects of external collection. They became subjects of national documentation, agricultural relevance, medicinal study, rangeland assessment, ecological research and conservation planning.
The publication of Migahid and Hammouda’s Flora of Saudi Arabia in 1974 is a particularly important milestone. It signalled the emergence of a Kingdom-wide botanical reference rather than a series of scattered observations from expeditions or neighbouring regions. A second edition followed in 1978, and a substantially revised third edition appeared in three volumes between 1988 and 1990.
This was not merely a bibliographic achievement. It marked the beginning of a national botanical language: a shared basis for identifying plants, comparing records, teaching students, curating collections and understanding the vegetation of the Kingdom on its own terms.
From national flora to living systems
From the 1980s onward, Saudi botany diversified rapidly.
Regional studies moved beyond broad national inventories. James P. Mandaville’s Flora of Eastern Saudi Arabia provided a practical guide to plants of the Eastern Province and showed the value of geographically focused floras for natural-resource management and conservation.[routledge]
Other work expanded into vegetation ecology, medicinal plants, agricultural weeds, mountain ecosystems and regional checklists. The work of researchers such as Ahmed M. Migahid, Abdulrahman Abulfatih, Shaukat Ali Chaudhary, Jacob Thomas, Ahmed Alfarhan, Turki Al-Turki, Jameel Mossa, Abdullah Al-Yahya and Al-Meshal helped build a more diverse body of Saudi botanical research. The emphasis increasingly shifted from simply asking, “What plants occur here?” to more ecological questions: “Where do they occur?” “What communities do they form?” “How are they used?” “What threatens them?” and “How should they be conserved?”
Herbaria became central to this transition. Collections associated with King Saud University, the Ministry of Agriculture, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and other institutions created the foundations for voucher-based research. They provided material evidence that could support floristic checklists, revisions, distribution records and future monitoring.
The emergence of national biodiversity reporting in the early 2000s further broadened the frame. Flora and vegetation became part of a larger agenda of protected areas, threatened species, land-use change and biodiversity policy. Saudi botanical knowledge was no longer solely a matter of identifying species. It became part of the scientific basis for managing a rapidly changing landscape.
A living botanical archive
Today, the online Plant Diversity of Saudi Arabia resource and Flora of Saudi Arabia checklist show how far the field has travelled. The historical record has moved from oral naming traditions and travellers’ diaries, through scattered specimens in distant collections, to national herbaria, floristic monographs, regional surveys and digital biodiversity resources.
Yet the history is still incomplete. Large parts of Saudi Arabia remain under-collected relative to their ecological diversity. Historical specimens often lack precise coordinates. Older literature can be taxonomically outdated. Many local plant names, uses, and ecological observations remain poorly connected to formal botanical databases. Climate change, grazing pressure, infrastructure development, invasive species and land transformation make the need for reliable baseline data more urgent, not less.
Saudi Arabia’s botanical history is therefore not only a story of what has been found. It is a story of how a country has built the capacity to see its plant diversity, name it, preserve evidence of it and decide what should happen next.
What might Saudi Arabia’s botanical future look like if historical herbarium records, Bedouin ecological knowledge, modern field surveys, remote sensing and open digital floras were brought together into one living national archive?
Leave a Reply