Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

A conservation institution, not just a garden

Search results about Kew will tell you about the Palm House, the 1759 founding, and the UNESCO listing. What they rarely say — and what Kew itself celebrated in October 2025 — is that the organisation’s most consequential work sits sixty kilometres south of London in a Sussex seed vault. The Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst, Kew’s wild botanic garden, has banked nearly 2.5 billion seeds from more than 40,000 wild plant species over 25 years, collected with 279 partner organisations across 100 countries. It is, by Kew’s description, the largest ex situ wild plant conservation programme in the world — and “widely considered the most biodiverse spot on Earth.”

The vaults are floodproof, radiation-proof, and designed to withstand an aircraft impact; seeds are stored at minus 20 degrees Celsius in walk-in freezers, and 92 per cent of the collections came directly from the wild. The collections are actively used, not merely stored: from 2020 to 2024 most seed requests went to research, the bank has contributed to more than 100 habitat-restoration projects in the UK since 2010, and Kew experts have trained over 3,000 professionals from 70 countries in seed-conservation practice. Sir David Attenborough called it “perhaps the most significant conservation initiative ever.” In its anniversary year Kew launched a £30 million Seeds Future Fund to scale the work, alongside a podcast series, Unearthed: The need for seeds, fronted by Kew’s ambassador for Wakehurst, Cate Blanchett.

The urgency behind the seed bank comes from Kew’s own science: its State of the World Plants and Fungi 2023 report estimated that 45 per cent of all flowering plants are at risk of extinction.

The organisation behind the garden

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, established under the National Heritage Act 1983, with exempt charitable status. Its statutory mission is to “understand and protect plants and fungi for the wellbeing of people and the future of all life on Earth,” with duties including investigation and research into the science of plants, dissemination of results, education, and the keeping of national reference collections.

Its origins lie in a royal estate on the Thames. The gardens trace to the arrival of George II and Queen Caroline in the 1720s; the founding of the botanic garden itself is conventionally dated to 1759, when Augusta, Princess of Wales, commissioned a physick garden. Her son George III, aided by gardener William Aiton and the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, built it into a vast “exchange house for empire” for the world’s plant collections. In 1840 Kew passed from the crown to the state and became a public facility; its first director was William Jackson Hooker, succeeded by his son Joseph Dalton Hooker. Today, Historic Royal Palaces manages the Kew Palace, Royal Kitchens, Great Pagoda, and Queen Charlotte’s Cottage, while RBG Kew manages the gardens themselves. The World Heritage Committee inscribed the gardens onto the UNESCO World Heritage List on 5 July 2003.

Kew’s taxonomic authority extends well beyond its own grounds. Its Plants of the World Online database is the reference for accepted plant names — for example, the rock fig Ficus palmeri is treated there as a synonym of Ficus petiolaris — and Kew’s nomenclatural decisions are cited by botanists worldwide.

What this profile does not claim

It does not state herbarium specimen counts or living-collection totals, exact annual visitor numbers, or the construction dates of the Palm and Temperate Houses — widely repeated figures not re-verified in the sources read for this profile. It does not characterise Kew as “the world’s largest” anything beyond the claims Kew itself makes about the Millennium Seed Bank.