Herbarium

Hunter House, housing Kew’s Herbarium and Library, is located just outside Kew’s Main Gate.

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Hunter House

Did you know?

The Herbarium is not open to the public but attracts an average of 50 researchers from around the world every week.

Kew’s Herbarium contains the collections of some of the UK’s most eminent scientists, including Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Joseph Hooker, John Hanning Speke, Richard Spruce and Ernest Wilson.

Historical information

Hunter House, housing Kew’s Herbarium and Library, is located just outside Kew’s Main Gate. The ground floor of the Grade II listed building was first leased by Kew from the State in 1853 to house it’s ‘embryo’ Herbarium (dried collections of preserved specimens documenting plants and fungi). Early donations included the herbaria of botanists George Bentham and the Reverend William A Bromfield; Kew director Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker’s herbarium was purchased by the State in October 1866 and accessioned to Kew the following year. In 1877, as the collection expanded, a new wing was added to the building.

Space continued to be a problem, as Director Professor Sir William Thistleton-Dyer explained to the Office of Works in 1899. “I cannot control the expansion of Kew Herbarium because I cannot control the expansion of the Empire. The scientific investigation of new territories follows their accretion”. Three further wings were added between 1902 and 1968, with further expansion into the quadrangle in 1988. In 2007, Kew commissioned Edward Cullinan architects to build a new building to house part of the Herbarium and Library as the collections continue to grow by some 35,000 specimens per annum.

The collections

Kew’s Herbarium, part of which began moving into the climate-controlled facilities of the new wing in 2010, houses over seven million dried and pressed plant specimens, including 350,000 ‘types’ (the original material upon which descriptions of new plants are based). These are supported by the ‘carpological collections’, boxes containing plant parts that are too bulky to be pressed and attached to sheets of paper. There are also 70,000 specimens of fleshy fruits and delicate flowers preserved in jars in the ‘Spirit Collection’. The Spirit Collections are stored in ‘Kew Mix’, a cocktail of alcohol, formaldehyde, glycerol and water.Kew’s collections are arranged in a systematic order with specimens of closely related families, genera and species placed near to one other in the Herbarium. They are constantly being added to and updated as new species are discovered, and previously unknown relationships uncovered. The collections are the basis for Kew’s global conservation work and many of its scientific publications. To facilitate advances in our botanical knowledge, Kew lends out specimens to botanists around the world and receives loans of material from other herbaria. When dried plant material enters the building, it is first frozen for three days at –40°C to ensure no insect pests that might damage the collections survive.