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 ...

A letter in the Directors' Correspondence archive describes how the deadly prediction of an old Chinese proverb about bamboo flowering came true. "When the bamboo flowers, famine, death and ...

Scientists at Kew have been studying pollen structure for many years, and trying to unravel how and why certain structures have evolved. In this blog, I will focus on how structures in pollen of ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...