The hard work bears a reward at the end of the day. In the evenings we sat outside our little house and admired the view ...

Gerhard Prenner, researcher in plant morphology and anatomy, presents his recent studies on Abrus precatorius, a "deadly beauty" with fascinating flowers and inflorescences. The genus Abrus consists ...

William Milliken, Head of Kew's Tropical America team, examines the importance of Kew's collection of over seven million herbarium specimens, and how this resource is being used to tackle the global ...

Like other gourds, the snake gourd is a member of the pumpkin family (Cucurbitaceae) and has seeds similar to its cousin the water melon (Citrullus lanatus), although slightly more eccentric, sporting ...

The Directors' Correspondence Team reveals the artistic talents of an amateur orchid enthusiast in Burma at the end of the 19th century. The Directors' Correspondence team really enjoyed the recent ...

Global species assessments, in which every extant species in a taxonomic group is systematically assessed, have been conducted only for very few plant groups such as cycads, conifers, mangroves and ...

The Director's Correspondence contains letters from several members of the Veitch family, famed for the Veitch & Sons Nurseries, a name synonymous with horticulture for much of the 18th century, when ...

Directors' Correspondence digitiser, Kat Harrington looks at letters to Kew's first official Director, Sir William Jackson Hooker, sent from Brazil. The first is from Maria Graham (in later life, ...

Jaume Pellicer and colleagues from Kew's Jodrell Laboratory describe the immense variation in the amount of DNA in flowering plants and why, when it comes to genomes, size really does matter. The ...

I have recently completed conservation of a large collection of botanical watercolours that were on a variety of supports including paper, vellum and a very fragile Chinese paper. The Ann Lee ...

Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP) is the largest wild plant conservation programme in the world. Now in its 15th year, the MSBP covers 84 countries and more than 200 organisations. As ...