Head of Strategic and Financial Planning

Background Information

Introduction to Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) Kew

RBG Kew is an internationally recognised centre of excellence in the field of botanical research. It is first and foremost a scientific institution and its collections of living and preserved plants, plant products and botanical information, built over 250 years of collecting, form an encyclopaedia of knowledge about the plant kingdom.

RBG Kew is devoted to increasing knowledge and public understanding of plant and fungal diversity, with a focus on scientific discovery, conservation and sustainable use. It works in partnership with organisations worldwide to help secure a future for some of the most threatened species and habitats and is responding to the demands brought about by climate change.

Approximately 650 members of staff work at RBG Kew, both on the Kew site in South West London and at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex. Our staff comprise around 150 scientists, 200 horticulturalists and the full range of technical, commercial, support and front-line staff. Kew also has around 450 volunteers and this number is planned to increase.

RBG Kew’s Location and Heritage

RBG Kew’s London site on the banks of the River Thames is an internationally renowned landscape that covers 300 acres. Within this Garden is one of the most diverse and valuable collections of plants on the planet. There is an arboretum of rare trees, extensive herbaceous beds, and some of the world’s largest and most famous botanical glasshouses including the Palm House.

Its many other historically important buildings are complemented by modern laboratories and specialist facilities in which RBG Kew undertakes world class scientific work. In recognition of the unique value of this contribution of landscape, buildings and collections, RBG Kew was officially included in the list of World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in July 2003.

RBG Kew celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2009 and throughout 2010 will be marking the International Year of Biodiversity.

Outside London, RBG Kew manages Wakehurst Place, a beautiful woodland garden in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the rolling High Weald of West Sussex. It is leased and managed on behalf of the National Trust, and is their most visited garden in the UK. It is also home to the Millennium Seed Bank. The cooler, moister environmental conditions on the estate of 468 acres complement those on the Kew site and greatly increase the range of plants that can be cultivated outside.

RBG Kew’s Public Status

RBG Kew is a Non Departmental Public Body (NDPB) with exempt charitable status, governed by a Board of Trustees, under the terms of the National Heritage Act, 1983. The Trustees are appointed by the Government Department DEFRA, except for one who is appointed by the Queen. Day to day control of RBG Kew is in the hands of the Director and the Corporate Executive Team.

As a body set up under statute, RBG Kew’s sponsoring Government Department, DEFRA (Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) has a role in ensuring that Kew is adequately resourced, through grant in aid to fulfil its statutory obligations. Funding also comes from visitor income and fundraising.

RBG Kew's statutory objectives are to:

• Carry out investigation and research into the science of plants and related subjects and disseminate the results;
• Provide advice, instruction and education in relation to the aspects of botany in which we are involved;
• Provide other plant related services including quarantine;
• Care for the collections; keep the collections secure as national reference collections, allow access to them and supplement them as resources allow;
• Allow public access for the purposes of gaining knowledge and enjoyment.

RBG Kew’s Key Values

RGB Kew has ten key values, that incorporate statutory and other obligations, and guide the means by which we will achieve impact through our Breathing Planet Programme.

1. Global conservation and sustainability – using RBG Kew’s unique combination of resources to support and deliver conservation and sustainability projects around the world.
2. High quality, high impact research – discovering and sharing information about plants and fungi, using and enhancing RBG Kew’s globally important scientific collections and knowledge.
3. Capacity building and collaboration – achieving plant conservation through capacity building, partnership and collaboration, higher education and training in local, national and international frameworks.
4. Policy advice – providing sound, scientific evidence and advice to advance and support informed debate, policy-making and action.
5. Engagement and learning – engaging large and diverse audiences in inspirational, enjoyable experiences, which encourage learning and positively change attitudes to plants and fungi, their conservation and sustainable use.
6. World-class horticulture – developing, promoting, teaching and delivering best practice in horticulture.
7. World heritage – caring for and enhancing RBG Kew’s heritage collections, buildings and landscapes, and communicating their universal value.
8. Empowering staff and volunteers – making Kew a great place to work for a vital cause.
9. Resources and infrastructure – developing professional, modern governance management, systems and services, communication and networks, and generating income and resources to achieve RBG Kew’s mission.
10. Excellent Customer Service – exceeding expectations in the quality and timeliness of customer service.

RBG Kew Breathing Planet Programme

The Breathing Planet Programme (BPP) is a way of organising, focusing and presenting RGB Kew’s work in order to maximise its relevance and impact in addressing the major environmental challenges we face today including habitat destruction and degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change. The BPP outlines seven key strategies which RGB Kew and its global partners will use to counter environmental challenges – by saving threatened plants and habitats and improving people’s quality of life.

The Breathing Planet Programme Strategies

1. Accelerating discovery and global access to plant and fungal diversity information - ddiscovering, collating and accelerating global access to essential information on plant and fungal diversity, through fundamental science, enhanced collection programmes and data-capture, including GIS baseline information and novel identification tools such as web-based floras and DNA barcoding.
2. Mapping and prioritising - identifying plant and fungal species and regions of the world most at risk of losing their wild diversity, to enable priority setting for conservation programmes, with the application of cutting edge IT and GIS approaches where they can enhance this process.
3. Conserving what remains - helping implement global plant and fungal conservation programmes such as creation of new sustainably managed areas through established and new partnerships in countries richest in diversity and geographical extent of remaining wild vegetation.
4. Sustainable local use - expanding plant and fungal diversity knowledge and Kew’s innovative science programmes to the identification and successful use of locally-appropriate plant species under changing climatic regimes on agricultural, urban and suburban lands.
5. MSB partnership seed banking - extending the Millennium Seed Bank’s global partnership programmes to secure in safe storage 25% of the world’s plant species by 2020, targeting species and regions most at risk from climate change.
6. Restoration ecology - establishing a global network of partners in restoration ecology to facilitate the use of seed banks and other botanic garden resources in the urgent repair and re-establishment of damaged native vegetation.
7. Inspiring through botanic gardens - ‘Kew for You’ – delivering enjoyable, inspiring experiences and horticultural displays that transform people’s understanding worldwide of plant diversity and conservation and their relevance to environmental challenges.

RBG Kew’s Collections

RBG Kew is a world's leader in plant knowledge with unique expertise in plant diversity. Its 19 major collections are the world's most comprehensive inventory of plants and knowledge forming a unique global resource. The collections are mostly held on the two sites at Kew in South West London and Wakehurst Place in West Sussex and the key collections are:

Living Plant Collections

This is the largest and most comprehensive living plant collection in the world, with 70,000 living plants representing more than one in eight of all flowering plant species. Plants are included in the collection for their scientific or educational value and used in research.

Many species within the collection are endangered in their natural habitats and RBG Kew is involved in their conservation as threats to the world’s vegetation escalate. Specimens of such plants are cultivated and propagated for distribution to other botanic gardens or for return to natural habitats.

Tender woody species are grown in the Temperate and Palm Houses and tender herbaceous plants are grown in the Princess of Wales Conservatory. The Davies Alpine House contains plants from mountains and high latitudes. Other hardy herbaceous plants are grown in the rock, grass and woodland gardens. Most of the hardy trees and shrubs grown in the Arboretum are arranged according to the Bentham and Hooker scientific classification.

The Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives

The Herbarium houses 7 million preserved plant specimens. 300,000 of these are ‘type’ specimens that determine the scientific application of plant names.
The Herbarium is a bedrock resource. Its organisation and scale enables an increasingly wide range of studies in conservation and science by users from around the world. Improving Internet access to Kew’s resources increases the assistance given to workers around the world.
The Library, Art and Archives hold a global collection of botanical literature, comprising more than 750,000 volumes. The new Shirley Sherwood Botanical Art Gallery, which opened in 2008, show cases some of RBG Kew’s wonderful botanical art collection.

The Jodrell Laboratory

The Jodrell Laboratory holds the largest DNA Bank in the world. The Jodrell scientists study plant structure, biochemistry, plant genetics and characteristics. Their research complements the taxonomic studies carried out in the Herbarium and helps to identify plants of potential economic importance.

Among the benefits emerging from this research are the isolation of plant chemicals of value as drugs and the identification of high-yielding fuel-wood trees. The economic value of plants has been recognised since RBG Kew’s earliest days.

Over time, a collection of over 72,000 plants and their products has been amassed by the Jodrell’s Centre for Economic Botany. The mycological collections comprise 850,000 fungal specimens, including the 300,000 specimen national reference collection for UK taxa.

The merge with CABI’s mycology unit in 2009 will bring a further 400,000 specimens into the collection and add valuable complementary skills.

The Millennium Seed Bank

The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) collection, based at Wakehurst Place in West Sussex, is the largest wild plant seed bank and one of the most ambitious global, conservation projects, collecting 10% of world's seeds by the year 2010 and 25% of the world's seeds by 2020.

With the capacity to store up to half the world’s wild flowering plant species, it currently holds over one billion seeds, representing nearly 33,000 different types and over 20,000 species.

Seeds are preserved in chilled, dry conditions and made available for study by scientists or for reintroduction into native habitats.

As a result of the MSB‘s partnerships and capacity building programme, all of this collection are now duplicated in over 50 countries

Wakehurst Place, West Sussex

RBG Kew’s ‘country garden’, is in the beautiful High Weald of Sussex. With its geography, climate and soil conditions both different from and complementing those found on the Kew site, Wakehurst Place allows many different species to flourish.

The planting styles range from formal walled gardens, through expansive specimen beds, to waterside and bog gardens. The estate is home to four National Collections: hypericums, skimmias, birches and southern beeches. The vast expanse of natural woodland contains trees from all the temperate zones in the world.

There is great emphasis on conservation, with the Loder Valley Nature Reserve embracing three major types of local habitat: woodland, meadowland and wetland. The Francis Rose Reserve is the first nature reserve in Europe dedicated to mosses, liverworts, lichens and cryptogams.