The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens maintains a globally significant collection of living and preserved plant collections, as well as botanical literature, to support its programs of research, conservation, education, and display. The unique collection, professional staff, and location in the subtropics, provide one of the finest environments for tropical botanical studies in the world.

Herbarium  The Selby Herbarium comprises 94,000+ dried, pressed botanical specimens from around the world. The collection focus is on epiphytic plants...principally Orchidaceae, Bromeliaceae, and Gesneriaceae, but many other plant families are represented. The Selby Gardens Type Specimen Collection is the largest of any herbarium in the SE United States (S of Missouri and New York), and available for viewing online. 

Living Collection With 12,000+ accessions, the Living Collection at Selby Gardens is the best in the world for its representation of warm-tropical epiphytes. The main epiphyte families, such as Orchidaceae, Bromeliaceae, and Gesneriaceae are particularly well-represented. Several pictorials of the collection are available for viewing online.

Spirit Collection  The Selby Gardens Spirit Collection of liquid-preserved plants is the second largest in the world, after Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.  A partial list of type specimens in this collection is available online.

Research Library  The Selby Gardens Research Library is one of the finest botanical libraries in the SE United States and an important source of literature for the entire western hemisphere. The library specializes on New World tropical and subtropical botany, ecology, and horticulture. A searchable catalogue is available on-line.