Category:Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Kew houses the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world.

The collections include around 7 million dried plant specimens in the Herbarium; a living collection of over 19,000 plant species spanning two sites (Kew Gardens and Wakehurst Place); the Fungarium containing 1.25 million dried fungal specimens; over 150,000 glass slides detailing plant micro-traits; 95,000 economic botany specimens; the world’s largest wild plant DNA and tissue bank (including 45,000 DNA samples representing 35,000 species); and over 2 billion seeds (from around 35,000 species) in the Millennium Seed Bank, in addition to many other smaller collections and databases. Alongside the physical collections, Kew holds a vast and growing collection of plant and fungal-related data and databases storing information on collections, names, taxonomy, traits, distributions, phylogenies, phenology and conservation.

The Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew houses approximately 7 million specimens, collected from all around the world. Specimens are either pressed and dried or preserved in spirit.

The collection at Kew is still growing with a yearly addition of around 30,000 new specimens through a programme of joint work with overseas colleagues, expeditions, gifts and exchanges with other institutes at home and abroad. The care of the collections, or curation, is undertaken with great precision.

Kew is committed to making this important collection more accessible to botanists and others, wherever they may be, for use in their own projects: particularly in biodiversity, conservation, sustainable development and systematics. To this end we are building an electronic Herbarium Catalogue containing images of the specimens and information taken from their collection labels.