The hard work bears a reward at the end of the day. In the evenings we sat outside our little house and admired the view ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

William Milliken, Head of Kew's Tropical America team, examines the importance of Kew's collection of over seven million herbarium specimens, and how this resource is being used to tackle the global ...

The Directors' Correspondence Team reveals the artistic talents of an amateur orchid enthusiast in Burma at the end of the 19th century. The Directors' Correspondence team really enjoyed the recent ...

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 ...

This year’s International Day for Biological Diversity highlights the uniqueness of island biodiversity and the threats it faces, yet so much of island diversity remains essentially unknown. On 22 May ...

Directors' Correspondence digitiser, Kat Harrington looks at letters to Kew's first official Director, Sir William Jackson Hooker, sent from Brazil. The first is from Maria Graham (in later life, ...

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 ...

The Director's Correspondence contains letters from several members of the Veitch family, famed for the Veitch & Sons Nurseries, a name synonymous with horticulture for much of the 18th century, when ...