Featured Stories
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Use our species browser to find over 350 plant and fungi profiles.
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Plants and fungi can be strange, beautiful, elusive, complex - and essential for life.
Discover a selection of some of the weirdest, most wonderful and most useful, including the giant - and foul smelling - titan arum.
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Fungi are unique and important organisms which belong to their own kingdom, completely separate from plants and animals.
Learn more about this group - which is thought to contain up to 5 million species around the world!
Plants & Fungi from Kew
Kew's international work helps to discover and describe the world’s plant and fungal diversity, conserve plants and habitats, promote the sustainable use of plants, and inspire an appreciation of plants and the environment.
Explore Kew's plant & fungi profiles
Can't find the species you're looking for? Search Kew's databases and publications.
Kew on expedition
Michiel van Slageren, from the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, describes the challenges faced and discoveries made when he and his team were collecting in the Namibian desert.
Discovery of world's first night-flowering orchid
Botanists from the Kew and the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity Naturalis have described the first night-flowering orchid known to science on the island of New Britain, near Papua New Guinea.
Bulbophyllum nocturnum is the first known example of an orchid species with flowers that consistently open after dark and close in the morning. Its flowers last one night only.
Save a species
One of a kind?
Experts at Kew are using innovative techniques to cultivate Roussea simplex in an attempt to help conserve this fascinating species.
This ‘botanical oddity’ has puzzled many a botanist. It is the only species in the genus Roussea and there are no clues as to which other plant families it is related to.
There is also only one known pollinator of Roussea simplex: the rare, endemic Mauritian blue-tailed day gecko (Phelsuma cepediana).
Plants & Fungi - news
Conserving British waxcap fungi
A Defra-funded project at Kew is working to find out how many waxcap species there are in Britain, and to improve methods for their identification. The results of this work should help conservationists to prioritise those species and sites which are most in need of further protection.
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The Millennium Seed Bank joins seed swap events
31 Jan 2012
Following the success of our Great Seed Swap, held at Wakehurst Place on 17 September 2011, the Millennium Seed Bank is supporting seed swap events around Sussex and further afield this year.
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Kew is recruiting a new Director
30 Jan 2012
After six years at Kew, the current Director (CEO and Chief Scientist), Professor Stephen D. Hopper FLS will be returning to Australia to take up a Chair in Biodiversity at The University of Western Australia.
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GIS surveys in New Guinea
13 Dec 2011
Kew botanists have helped to survey the vegetation of Biak Island, off the north coast of New Guinea.
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Welcome to Stephen Hopper's blog
by: Prof. Stephen Hopper, 04 Dec 2009
A successful 250th anniversary year for Kew.
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World's smallest waterlily brought back from the brink of extinction at Kew
Kew’s top propagation ‘code-breaker’, horticulturist Carlos Magdalena, has cracked the enigma of growing a rare species of African waterlily. The 'thermal’ lily (Nymphaea thermarum) is believed to be the smallest waterlily in the world, with pads that can be as little as 1 cm in diameter.
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Director (CEO and Chief Scientist) of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to return to Australia
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew announced today that Director (CEO and Chief Scientist), Professor Stephen Hopper FLS will step down in autumn 2012 after six years in the job.
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