Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a government organization in the United Kingdom supported by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It is an important center for plant research and education, employing 1,100 people. The organization’s board of trustees is led by Dame Amelia Fawcett.
The organization manages gardens at Kew in Richmond upon Thames, southwest London, and at Wakehurst Place, a National Trust property in Sussex. Wakehurst Place is home to the Millennium Seed Bank, which works with groups in over 95 countries. Kew, along with the Forestry Commission, established Bedgebury National Pinetum in Kent in 1923. This garden specializes in growing conifer trees. In 1994, the Castle Howard Arboretum Trust was created as a partnership between Kew and the Castle Howard Estate to manage the Yorkshire Arboretum.
In 2019, Kew had 2,316,699 visitors, and Wakehurst Place had 312,813 visitors. The Kew site covers 326 acres (132 hectares) and includes 40 historically important buildings. It was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003. The gardens and Wakehurst Place together have more than 27,000 types of living plants, 8.3 million dried plant samples, and over 2.4 billion seeds collected from nearly 40,000 species in the Millennium Seed Bank.
Mission
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew explains that its goal is to use science to learn more about plants and fungi and how they can be used. A meeting held in 1976 by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew was important because it helped create a group to find out which endangered plants are being grown and where they are located, which helped protect them.
Governance
Kew is led by a group of trustees. This group includes a chairman and eleven members. Ten members and the chairman are chosen by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The monarch appoints one trustee, based on the Secretary of State's recommendation.
As of February 2026, the board members are:
- Dame Amelia Fawcett (Chair)
- Steve Almond
- Judith Batchelar
- Fay Cooke
- Professor Christopher Gilligan
- Professor Ian Graham
- Sarah Greasley
- Dame Dervilla Mitchell
- Sir Paul Nurse
- Dr Fiona Pathiraja
- Kate Priestman
- David Richardson
Kew Science
More than 470 scientists work at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The Director of Science is Alexandre Antonelli. The Deputy Directors are Elizabeth Gardner, Paul Kersey, and Monique Simmonds.
The Kew Science team includes staff from the Kew Madagascar Conservation Centre.
Scientists at Kew keep records about plants and fungi and manage digital resources, including the following:
Plants of the World Online is an online database launched in March 2017. It is one of nine major projects with the goal of allowing users to access information about all known seed-bearing plants by 2020. This database connects taxonomic data with images from Kew’s collection to provide a single source of information about plant identification, where they grow, their traits, conservation status, genetic relationships, and uses.
The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) includes information from the Index Kewensis, a project started in the 19th century to create a list of names and sources for all known flowering plants and their countries. IPNI is supported by the Harvard University Herbaria and the Australian National Herbarium. It was launched in 1999 to provide a reliable source of information about plant names, including details about seed plants, ferns, and lycophytes. IPNI lists all published plant names, including new species, new combinations, and new names at the level of plant families down to smaller categories. It also provides data for other projects, such as Tropicos and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
Neotropikey is an international project based at Kew Gardens that focuses on flowering plants in the Neotropics (tropical South and Central America).
The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (WCSP) is a list of accepted scientific names and synonyms for 200 selected seed plant families. It is widely used, and many authoritative websites about plants use it as a foundation.
The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) includes all known vascular plant species, such as flowering plants, conifers, ferns, clubmosses, and firmosses. It is based on data from the WCSP and IPNI and only includes names found in those databases. WCVP is the taxonomic database for Plants of the World Online. Since WCSP includes only selected families, WCVP aims to complete the process.
The World Checklist of Useful Plant Species lists 40,292 species, including nine non-plant groups (such as nostoc, forkweed, and brown algae), compiled from multiple existing datasets.
Kew also worked with the Missouri Botanical Garden and other international organizations on The Plant List (TPL). Unlike IPNI, TPL provided information about which plant names are currently accepted. TPL was an online encyclopedia project launched in 2010 to create a complete list of plant names. It included records for 1,064,035 scientific names, representing 350,699 accepted plant species. It also listed 642 plant families and 17,020 plant genera. TPL was last updated in 2013 and was replaced by World Flora Online, which was developed in 2012 and aimed to include all known plants by 2020.