Returning from Rolf Santesson\'s 90th birthday party in his home, I opened the Uppsala Botanical Museum visitors\’ book introduced by him at the beginning of 1950s. The first page shows the signature of our former king, Gustav VI Adolf, who visited the Museum in connection with a donation of new cassettes for the material of the pupils of Linnaeus, Fredrik Hasselquist and Pehr Kalm. The old, empty cassettes should go back to the castle library at Drottningholm. The visitors\’ book contains thousands of entries, which provide a botanical history, ending with my retirement in May 2005. Why did we have so many visitors, and who were they? As an answer to the first question, we can point at a long line of scientists resident in or associated with Uppsala over many years who have assembled important collections from around the world and described new species, including Erik Acharius, Elias Fries, Thore Magnus Fries, G. Einar Du Rietz, Adolf Hugo Magnusson and, of course, Rolf Santesson. More recently we added the extensive collections of Gunnar Degelius and we should not forget those of Leif Tibell, Roland Moberg, Mats Wedin and Anders Nordin