Stroll through a sensory haven of winding pathways and towering birches, in a garden especially design to be enjoyed in ...

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 ...

A conveyor belt of seeds passes idly beneath a metal cylinder, when suddenly – ZAP – tiny purple bolts of lightning rain down ...

Passiflora or passion flower is a genus of more than 550 species which are members of the Passifloraceae family. The genus, which contains vines, lianas, shrubs and trees, is predominantly distributed ...

James Wearn, leading a project called ‘Kew Gardens at War’, describes how one poppy helped to keep pain away during wartime while another poppy lets us remember and reflect on the pain and sorrow of ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Discover more about the conservation work carried out on one of the most important, popular and fascinating collection in the Archives. Among the several million original items in Kew’s Archives is a ...