Specimens
Carpological Collection
Economic Botany Collection
Essential Oils
Wood Samples
Specimen of Goodyera Stored in Spirit
There are about 2,639 herbaria in the world and they contain a huge variety of plants ranging from pine trees, grasses, palms and orchids to cacti and potatoes. Some have special collections such as mosses or seaweeds, mushrooms or lichens. Kew's Herbarium currently houses flowering plants (angiosperms), pines and cycads (gymnosperms), ferns and a collection of fungi (mycological specimens): from the largest toadstool down to microscopic yeasts; the Natural History Museum in London has collections of mosses and seaweeds . For a complete list of the herbaria around the world, with the scope and size of their collection and staff expertise you can refer to Index Herbariorum.
The Kew Herbarium is representative of global plant diversity. It contains more than 7 million specimens. Ninety-eight per cent of all the genera from all flowering plant families are represented within this collection.
A specimen may consist of a whole plant (in the case of small herbs) or parts of a plant (in the case of large trees or bushes). They will include samples of the leaves, stem, bark and ideally should include flowers and/or fruits, since these are of most use later when identifying plants or using the specimens to study relationships between plants. Additional, ancillary collections, will often be made at the same time. Exactly what is collected will depend on the sort of plant being collected but might include wood samples, dried fruits, flowers preserved in spirit, photographs or, more recently, DNA samples.
The size and richness of Kew's collection with specimens from all over the world, reflects its pre-eminence as a centre of botanical expertise for more than 200 years. Many specimens in our collections were donated by important collectors from past centuries or obtained in exchange with partner institutions from other countries. The make up of the collection also reflects the specialist skills and interests of staff that work here and that have worked here in the past. Thus the legume, orchid and palm collections at Kew are particularly rich as many famous botanists specialising in these families have worked at Kew.
Today, Kew carefully targets new acquisitions. Primarily we work with collections from tropical countries where the flora is far less well known and where new plant species are still being discovered at a rate of about 4,000 every year. We also target new species from particular families or the plants from particularly threatened types of habitat, and plants relevant to our wider research programme.
Plants are only incorporated into Kew's collection if they have been collected and brought into the UK according to a set of strict procedures established by international treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).