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A brief history of conservation at the Royal

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DOI: 10.1007/s12225-010-9231-2

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KEW BULLETIN VOL. 65: 501Y508 (2010)

A brief history of conservation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Ghillean T. Prance

Summary. When Princess Augusta and Lord Bute, followed by Sir Joseph Banks and King George III, started
gathering plants at Kew, conservation on the site can be said to have begun. Although the primary motive then was
to assist the expansion of the British Empire and trade, rare plants were gathered and some became rare or extinct
in the wild as their habitats were destroyed. The primary motive in the nineteenth century was not conservation,
but the history of conservation at the Royal Gardens at Kew dates back to its very origins. Subsequent regimes at
Kew maintained and added to the collections thereby adding to their conservation value. Many early collections
are of species now listed within the IUCN categories of endangerment. Environmental awareness and concern had
begun by the time that Professor Jack Heslop-Harrison became director and he was the first director actively to
initiate specific conservation programmes such as seed banking and work on red data books. From then on
conservation became an integral part of the work programme of Kew and the focus on conservation has increased
with each subsequent director. This eventually led to the transformation of the embryonic seed banking activities
into the Millennium Seed Bank, the largest and most important bank in the world for the conservation of the seeds
of wild species. It currently holds just over ten percent of all seed plant species. Conservation at Kew over the past
three decades has very much been a balance between ex situ work and in situ activities to help conservation in the
overseas areas where Kew scientists have experience. Throughout the history of the gardens there has been a vital
interest in economic botany that has developed from moving plants around the empire to much work on the
sustainable use of plants and ecosystems thereby better equipping the institution to subsequently work on in situ
conservation. Significant conservation activity at Kew has been possible because it is being supported by a solid
research programme that includes such areas as systematics and molecular genetics and laboratories, a large
herbarium and a large library. Kew has played an important role in stimulating conservation work elsewhere and
such units as the Threatened Plants Unit of IUCN and Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) have
their roots in Kew. Among other important conservation initiatives have been the creation of a unit to work with
the implementation of the CITES treaty on the trade of endangered plants and a legal unit to work on issues of the
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). There is no doubt that the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew is at the
forefront of plant conservation.

Key Words. conservation, history, red data books, seed banking.

Early years vegetation was under threat even then, conservation

When Princess Augusta declared that she wanted to
accumulate all species of plants in her garden at Kew,
the long history of plant conservation at Kew began.
Although it was many years before the term conserva-
tion was used, the fact that some vary rare plants were
gathered and grown at Kew meant that ex situ
conservation had started thanks to the association
between the Princess and John Stuart the third Earl of
Bute and the gardening skill of William Aiton who
started working for the Princess in 1759. Aiton
published his first edition of Hortus Kewensis in 1789
and it includes 3,500 species planted during his first
thirty years at Kew. The second edition of the Hortus
(Aiton 1810 – 1813) was a five volume work published
between 1810 and 1813 and it listed 11,013 species.
Since many of these were from areas where the
at Kew was well underway and has continued in this
way ever since to the some 50,000 taxa currently held
at Kew. Turrill (1959) quotes Thiselton-Dyer about
Princess Augusta:
“She died in 1772, but in the preceding 20 years
she gave Kew gardens the definitely scientific
character which they have since retained.”
In the succeeding years, plant collecting for Kew
continued firstly to gather a collection of interesting
plants at Kew and then, in the reign of King George III
with the help of Sir Joseph Banks, to further the goals
of the empire. During the time of Banks and later
during the directorships of William and Joseph
Hooker the primary goal was to collect and study

Accepted for publication November 2010.

1
Honorary Research Fellow, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 3AB, UK.

© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010

502 KEW BULLETIN VOL. 65(4)

plants of economic interest. These activities and the
growing scientific programme at Kew that was cata-
loguing the plants of the world in Floras, led to the
rapid growth of the herbarium that is now an essential
tool for conservation. At the same time the living
collections grew considerably. Perhaps some of the
plants gathered into Kew from oceanic islands became
the most crucial for conservation because it is in these
places of high species endemism that species were
most threatened by habitat destruction and the
introduction of alien species. Conservation at Kew
had begun, but it was not yet labelled as such.
Table 1 lists a few of the rare plants that were
conserved through the early collections of Kew. From
early days Kew was receiving plants from all over the
world from collectors such as Francis Masson. The
conservation of many species was enhanced by the fact
that Kew was a generous donor of plants as well, sending
consignments to the British Colonies and European
botanical gardens and maintaining a mutually beneficial
exchange with British nurseries and gardens. For
example in 1902 the Natal Botanic Garden presented
to Kew a specimen of Encephalartos woodii Hort. which is
said to be the last surviving specimen in the world.
Embryonic Conservation
The publication of Turrill’s book (1959) coincided
with the two hundredth anniversary of the Royal
Botanic Gardens and it is interesting to see that just
fifty years ago there is no mention of conservation. In
fact the word conservation is not used anywhere in this
volume. A few years later King (1976) published an
unofficial history of Kew and again conservation is
hardly mentioned. The penultimate sentence of that
book, which covered the period up to the end of the
directorship of Sir George Taylor, mentions the
establishment of work on the Red Data Book for
plants. During the tenure of Sir George two things
were done to initiate conservation at Kew. First was the
contracting of retired Kew botanist Ronald Melville in
1968 to prepare the Red Data Book for plants and
second was the establishment in 1968 of a Seed Unit to
store seeds under refrigerated conditions. The work
on a Red Data Book for plants was suggested to Sir
George by Sir Peter Scott the founder of WWF and the
then Chairman of the Species Survival Commission
(SSC) of IUCN. Melville began to gather data on
selected endangered species. This first list of 118
species was issued by IUCN in 1970 and 1971 in
loose-leaf folder format as Volume five of a series of
Red Data Lists (Melville 1970, 1971). Melville estimated
even in the late 1960s that 20,000 species were
endangered. His list focussed strongly on island plants
from such places as St. Helena, Hawai’i, the Canary
Islands, the Seychelles and the Juan Fernandez
islands.
The initial emphasis of the seed bank was much more
on seed physiology and storage rather than conservation.
At the time of these activities the destruction of natural
environments began to accelerate rapidly and so the next
Director of Kew, Professor John Heslop-Harrison was the
person who really began to bring conservation seriously
into the mission of the Gardens.
The Heslop-Harrison era (1971 – 1976)
Professor Heslop-Harrison was Director of Kew for the
relatively short period of five years, but he deserves a
separate section here because it was under him that

Table 1. Examples of a few plants collected for Kew in the early days that have now become valuable for conservation.

Species Family Origin Date of Kew accession IUCN Category

Agave schottii Agavaceae USA, Arizona 1921 E
Aloe squarrosa Aloaceae Yemen, Socotra 1967 E
Alsinidendron trinerve Caryophyllaceae Hawai’i 1961 CE
Cestrum psittacinum Solanaceae Possibly Mexico
Dioon spinulosum Zamiaceae Mexico 1907 R
Echinocactus grusonii Cactaceae Mexico 1930 E
Encephalartos woodii Cycadaceae South Africa 1899 EXT
Erica verticillata Ericaceae South Africa, Cape 1961 EXT
Eucommia ulmoides Eucommiaceae China 1930 R
Euphorbia decaryi Euphorbiaceae Madagascar 1959 E
Hibiscus clayi Malvaceae Hawai’i 1961 E
Laelia anceps Orchidaceae Mexico 1922, 1941 E
Metrosideros carminea Myrtaceae New Zealand N.I. 1965 E
Paphiopedilum rothschildianum Orchidaceae Malaysia, Sabah 1963 E
Sophora toromiro Fabaceae Easter Island V
a
Tecophilaea cyanocrocus Tecophilaeaceae Chile 1972 EXT
Tulipa sprengeri Liliaceae Turkey EXT
a
Listed and thought to be extinct, but recently found again in the wild

© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSERVATION AT THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW
conservation became a serious part of the mission of
the Gardens. He inherited an embryonic Red Data
Book, but was aware that much more needed to be
done. On 10th August 1973 a meeting was held at Kew,
convened by the SSC Alert Group of IUCN. It was
agreed there that an SSC specialist committee on
threatened plants was required. Accordingly the SSC
created the Threatened Plants Committee at its full
meeting on 21 – 22 May 1974 with Gren Lucas as
Secretary and Hugh Synge as its Research Assistant.
This unit was based in the herbarium at Kew, but was
an integral part of IUCN and was also funded by the
World Wildlife Fund. Its initial remit was to produce
Red Data Books and to maintain databases. The
IUCN/WWF staff and Kew staff were managed as
one unit by Gren Lucas. Lucas & Synge (1978)
published the first hard-bound Red Data Book for
plants containing data on 250 carefully selected
sample species of threatened and endangered plants
from the Melville list. In 1973 the Threatened Plants
Unit (TPU) as it was now called, received a challenge
from Dr Max Walters, then Director of the University
of Cambridge Botanic Garden, to prepare a list of
threatened plants of Europe to accompany Flora
Europaea of which he was an editor. In 1975 the TPU
received funds from the Council of Europe to prepare
the list of threatened species of Europe. This book,
which went through three drafts, listed 2,100 species
and used the taxonomy of Flora Europaea as a basis
(IUCN Threatened Plants Committee 1977). Gren
Lucas chose the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of
Biological Conservation to work on the listing of plants
for the Caribbean and Latin America. The work on
plant listing has progressed far since these early days
and today Kew coordinates the GIS-based plant
component of the IUCN Sampled Red List Index.
In 1973 Duncan Poore, the Director of The Nature
Conservancy, approached Heslop-Harrison to enquire
what plants were likely to be traded commercially
because the CITES convention was then being drafted.
It had been in the making for a number of years and
was endorsed by the 1972 Stockholm United Nations
Conference on the Human Environment. Kew was
asked to provide a list of plants for the initial meeting of
CITES in Washington, DC in January 1973. One of the
contentious issues at that conference was whether plants
should be included at all under the Convention. It was
Gren Lucas who co-ordinated the production of a
document on traded plants for The Nature Conservancy
to take to the meeting and fortunately plants were
incorporated into the Convention. Appropriately Lucas
represented Kew at the launch of the CITES convention.
As a result of early participation and leadership Kew was
designated as the UK Scientific Authority of CITES for
plants, an activity that continues today under the
leadership of Noel McGough. This has meant that Kew
receives and holds many confiscated plants or finds
503
alternative non-commercial homes for them. One of the
first batches to be seized was a large quantity of
cyclamens entering through the port of Dover.
These were eventually distributed to several
National Trust gardens around the country. Today
this sort of work continues, for example, the CITES
unit advises the newly independent country of
Georgia how to handle its export of snowdrops.
Training has always been an important part of the
CITES work and Kew has trained over 450 CITES
enforcement officers from the UK and abroad
including many customs and police officers.
Gren Lucas became the chair of the Species
Survival Commission of IUCN in 1980 and it set up
TRAFFIC, a unit that was funded by WWF to be an
independent body to work behind the scenes on trade
of organisms. Its initial focus was on the trade of
primates and orchids. TRAFFIC monitors the move-
ment of wildlife and wildlife products around the
world and discloses infractions when necessary.
In 1979 the Foreign Office gave funds to Kew to
work on the conservation of plants in the UK
Dependent Territories. Heslop-Harrison also helped
to stimulate the first conservation meeting with
which Kew was involved. This was sponsored by
NATO’s Eco-Sciences Panel and was held at Kew
from 2 – 6 September 1975 on the topic ‘The
function of living plant collections in conservation and in
conservation oriented research and public education.’ The
proceedings of this conference were published in the
first of a NATO conference series on ecology (Simmons
et al. 1976). The excellent conference resolutions were
widely distributed.
The work of Yolande Heslop-Harrison on breeding
systems of plants was also a good support to the new
focus on conservation brought to Kew by her husband.
An important contribution to conservation at Kew
was the acquisition of Wakehurst Place in Sussex in
1965. This 500 acre property already contained an
important collection of trees, but also had areas of
natural woodland of the Sussex Weald. This was
officially dedicated as the Loder valley Reserve in
1980 when it was opened as such by Sir Giles Loder
with the enthusiastic support of Tony Schilling who
was head of Wakehurst at that time. Plans for nature
trails and use of the reserve were worked on enthusi-
astically by Harry Townsend. This was put into a
conservation and management plan for the reserve
by John Lonsdale who was working at Wakehurst at
that time. The newly named Francis Rose Reserve at
Wakehurst is one of the first in the UK dedicated to
the conservation of cryptogams. The Conservation
mission of Wakehurst was affirmed early by the trans-
fer of the seed physiology and seed bank there in 1973
under the leadership of Peter Thomson. Another
important development for conservation under
Heslop-Harrison was the establishment of a micro-
© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010
504
propagation unit in 1974. This has enabled the
propagation of some of the rarest plants that are in
need of conservation.
Conservation continues to gain momentum
It is certainly true to say that conservation really
became part of the daily mission of Kew under the
directorship of Professor Heslop-Harrison. It has not
looked back since and subsequent Directors have each
increased the emphasis on conservation as the
destruction of habitats and the loss of species has also
increased rapidly. The earlier conservation conference
was followed up under the directorship of Patrick
Brenan (1976 – 1981) with an important conference
on: ‘The practical role of botanic gardens in the conservation
of rare and threatened plants,’ (Published as Survival or
Extinction, Synge & Townsend 1979) that took place
from 11 – 17 September 1978. The movers behind this
conference were especially Curator, John Simmons
and Ian Beyer who both wanted to increase science in
the living collections and saw conservation as a way of
achieving this. One of the spin-offs from this confer-
ence was the establishment in 1979 of a Botanical
Gardens Conservation Co-ordinating Body. This was
set up as a membership organisation for botanic
gardens world-wide to assist with their conservation
activities and this was initially led by Ian Beyer. The
initial thrust was to prepare and circulate lists of
threatened species that were cultivated in the gardens.
As a result of this growing momentum in conserva-
tion some dynamic young staff with a passion for
conservation were engaged by the living collections
department such as Mike Fay, Andrew Jackson and
Michael Maunder. The appointment of Fay reinforced
the use of the micropropagation unit for conservation
rather that solely for propagation. He was brought in
to run a service unit for propagation, but because of
his background in genetics and crop breeding he soon
began to work on rare plants and their conservation
and reintroduction. Fay quickly progressed his career
to take on an important role in conservation genetics
in the molecular section of the Jodrell Laboratory. His
current work uses genetic information to make con-
servation decisions and is closely linked with the
programmes of Natural England. Pioneer work on
fingerprinting Cypripedium calceolus L. and Orchis
militaris L. have been flagships of this work. Michael
Maunder helped to make many connections for
conservation with other organisations at home and
abroad. For example this led to some collaboration
with London Zoo on the conservation of Partulid
snails. Maunder made many overseas contacts espe-
cially with UK overseas territories and this led to
repatriation work in such places as Saint Helena. The
increased focus on conservation in LCD inevitably led
to some disputes about the division of financial
© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010
KEW BULLETIN VOL. 65(4)
resources between conservation activities and more
traditional work, but the progress that has followed in
both areas has shown that this has worked out well.
Under the Brenan directorship the TPU grew
considerably. In 1979 the Foreign Office gave funds
to Kew to work on the conservation of plants in the
UK Dependent Territories. At that time Sara Oldfield
was appointed to the staff to oversee this activity and
also to be involved in Kew’s participation in CITES.
Christine Leon joined as TPC Research assistant for
Europe in March 1980, Charlie Jarvis as African
specialist in April 1980 and Stephen Davis as Asian
specialist in September 1981. This small and active unit
and the Botanic gardens Conservation Co-ordinating
Body eventually evolved into an independent organisa-
tion, Botanic Gardens Conservation International, that is
so active today in promoting conservation through
botanic gardens. This idea originated from a botanic
gardens conference held in November 1985 at Las
Palmas, Canary Islands, on how botanic gardens could
contribute to implementing the recently drafted World
Conservation Strategy (Bramwell et al. 1986). A botanic
gardens strategy was prepared by Professor Vernon
Heywood and approved at this conference. In January
1986, after a meeting with IUCN in Gland, the Botanic
Gardens Conservation Secretariat was set up and it
began work under the directorship of Professor
Heywood, on the first of January 1987 and was located
at Kew. This unit eventually developed into the
independent NGO, Botanic Gardens Conservation
International (BGCI), which is still housed on Kew
property and is now directed by Sara Oldfield. Much of
its current success is due to the efforts of its first two
directors Vernon Heywood and Peter Wyse-Jackson who
built up this network of botanic gardens into a force for
conservation and conservation education. The TPC
moved from Kew to Cambridge to join an animal unit
to found the World Conservation Monitoring Centre
(WCMC), but it appears that plants did not keep up the
same momentum there and so the work of BGCI and of
Kew are ever more important.
Under Kew’s directorship of Arthur Bell (1981 – 1988),
orchid conservation gained momentum when the Sains-
bury Orchid Conservation Project was established funded
by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury and directed by Joyce
Stewart. A key to the success of this unit was the
appointment of Mark Clements from Australia who
brought with him the techniques for germinating orchid
seed with their mycorrhizae. The orchid unit depended
heavily on the micropropagation facility for its success
and it was endowed by the Sainsburys in 1989. One of its
several successes has been the re-establishment of
Cypripedium calceolus L. in its native habitat in northern
England. Also in 1989 the first full time seed collector
was appointed to the Seed Bank, indicating an increased
awareness of the importance of this activity. It was
Roger Smith who changed the focus of the seed
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSERVATION AT THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW
bank from a more traditional seed research unit
and seed collection for Kew into a seed bank for the
conservation of rare species.
The Millennium Seed Bank
When the UK government announced that a fund
would be established to celebrate the 2000 millennium
and that it would include ten large ‘landmark’
projects, I and other senior management at Kew
decided that Kew should try to bid for one of these.
We solicited ideas from staff about what project we
should put forward, and several suggestions were
made from different parts of the Gardens. One
proposal stood out as truly millennial and that was
the suggestion from Roger Smith, the head of the
small seed banking section at Wakehurst Place. His
idea was vastly to expand our seed banking and seed
research activities and to call it the Millennium Seed
Bank. Soon, with Trustee approval, a proposal to the
Millennium Commission of the lottery was drafted and
the search for other funding was initiated because we
knew that the lottery rules only provided half of the
funding for their projects. The Millennium Seed Bank
which cost £85 million to set up, owes it existence to
the hard work of Giles Coode Adams who was Director
of the Kew Foundation at that time and to Sir Jeffrey
Bowman who was the lead trustee involved. It was their
contacts and hard work that got counterpart funding
from bodies such as the Welcome Trust and the
Orange Company. Deputy Director John Lavin
handled a lot of the administration that was needed
to establish the project. The ambitious goals were soon
set to collect and bank seeds of the entire British Flora
by 2000 and ten percent of the world flora by 2010.
The project included funds for construction of the
building that now houses the seed bank and funds for
both collection and research on seed banking meth-
ods and seed physiology. More on the seed bank is
covered elsewhere in this symposium, but I wanted to
give some details of the foundation of this important
part of conservation at Kew and to acknowledge the
good work of some of the people involved. The entire
staff of the original seed banking section were
obviously intimately involved in setting up the project.
It is at this conference that we celebrate the achieve-
ment of reaching the ten percent goal of the
Millennium Seed Bank.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
One of the most significant contributions to conserva-
tion through Kew has been its active participation in
the CBD process. At Kew this started in 1992, the same
year as the Convention was drafted, when we intro-
duced the first benefit-sharing policy. This short
document committed us to share with countries of
505
origin at least half of any benefits arising from plant
screening agreements. In 1994 I asked environ-
mental lawyer Kerry ten Kate to conduct a con-
sultancy to review the implications for Kew of the
CBD. This made it obvious that it was in our own
interests to be directly involved with the CBD and
the development of policies that could affect our
work around the world. Accordingly a CBD officer
post was created at Kew in 1996 and ten Kate filled
this position. This unit continues its important work
today with China Williams and Madeleine Groves.
An important product from the CBD unit that I still
consult frequently was the report prepared for the
European Commission on the commercial use and
benefit-sharing of biodiversity (ten Kate & Laird
1999).
It is the work of this CBD unit, Botanical Garden
Conservation International and of the scientists at
Kew that enabled Kew and other similar organisa-
tions to play such an important role in the develop-
ment of the 2002 Global Strategy for Plant
Conservation (GSPC). This vital document is the
first target-driven strategy to be developed under
the CBD. Today Kew is working on several of the
targets and was invited to be the facilitating
organisation for target one of the GSPC which is
to produce a widely accessible working list of known
plant species. The 2003 conference together with
Plantlife International and the Joint Nature Con-
servation Committee was held at Kew and led to the
official UK response to the GSPC. A 2006 joint
meeting at Kew followed this up to assess the
progress against the targets of the GSPC.
Economic Botany and Conservation
Economic botany has been an emphasis at Kew since
the early days when Sir Joseph Banks was assisting the
Empire by moving plants around the world. There
have been positive and negatives in this activity, but
there is no doubt that the information, collections and
expertise gained through these activities have now
become important for conservation and the sustain-
able use of plant resources. The gradual change
from enhancing the finances of an empire to using
economic botany to promote sustainability is part
of the history of Kew. One of the most useful tools
for the change was the establishment in 1981 by
Gerald Wickens of the SEPASAL data base (Survey
of Economic Plants of Arid and Semi-arid Lands).
This focus on arid lands eventually led to Kew’s
participation in the Plants of the Northeast Programme
in Brazil. This bi-national project emphasising the use of
local plants for local people has done much to stimulate
interest in sustainable use of the plants of northeast
Brazil. It was made possible by an initial grant of a
million pounds from the Weston Family Foundation.
© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010
506
This lead to many other sources of funding for the
project.
Conservation Overseas
As conservation work increased at Kew so did the
involvement of its staff abroad as mentioned above for
northeastern Brazil. Some of these are listed in Table 2
and a few are mentioned below. Kew’s ability to
become active in conservation in so many places was
because of its long history of scientific collaboration
and training with institutions all over the world. Africa
had long been a focus of Kew’s scientific work and a
good example of transferring this to conservation was
in the 1980s through the help given to the Limbe
Botanic Garden in Cameroon. The project was set up
and run by Mark Bovey who relocated from Wakehurst
Place to Cameroon. It involved both the restoration of
the old colonial botanic garden and the conservation
of the forests of Cameroon. Herbarium botanists
Roger Polhill and Nigel Hepper gave much assistance
to the Limbe project in its early days. More recently
Martin Cheek has been much involved with the
botanical inventory that led to the creation of the
Kupe-Muanenguba National Park in Cameroon. John
Dransfield, palm specialist from the herbarium was
involved in the conservation and sustainable use of the
rattans palms in Borneo. This project, in collaboration
with the Commonwealth Development Corporation,
has helped to prevent the over-exploitation of this
valuable resource. The wood anatomy team in the
Jodrell Laboratory has made its contribution with the
Table 2. Some Overseas Conservation Projects of RBG Kew.
Country Project
Argentina Conservation education for primary
school teachers
Brazil Plants of the Northeast, local plants for
local people
Brazil Extractivism and habitat restoration in
Mato Grosso State
Cameroon Restoration of Limbe Botanic Garden
and rainforest conservation, Kupe-
Muanenguba National Park
India Staff training and conservation for
Trivandrum Botanic Garden
Kenya Wild harvest project with National
Museums of Kenya
Madagascar Identification of key areas for
conservation using GIS
Malaysia, Sarawak Sustainable use of rattans for cane
Peru Habitat restoration and sustainable use of
dry forest.
St Helena Rescue and conservation of rare endemic
flora
UK Overseas Conservation work in Montserrat, British
Territories Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos and
other overseas territories
© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010
KEW BULLETIN VOL. 65(4)
work on firewood plantations in Zimbabwe and in
Brazil, begun by David Cutler and continued by Peter
Gasson. Michael Maunder and others were involved in
a conservation programme for the Island of Saint
Helena in the south Atlantic and since the arrival of
Colin Clubbe this has led to a much greater involve-
ment with other UK Overseas Territories such as the
British Virgin Islands, Montserrat and other Caribbean
territories. The work of the Seed Bank in the UK
Overseas Territories is also contributing to their
conservation efforts. The Darwin Initiative, which
resulted from the Earth summit held in Rio de Janeiro
in 1992, has been a vital supporter for this overseas
work.
Another long-term relationship has been with
the Trivandrum Botanic Garden in Kerala, India.
Kew has trained many of the Trivandrum staff,
many Kew staff have visited there, and this botanic
garden has become a leader in conservation for
southern India.
The book entitled Plant Conservation in the Tropics:
Perspectives and Practice (Maunder et al. 2002), brought
together much of the information gathered by these
overseas efforts. Madagascan conservation has been
greatly stimulated by the work of Justin Moat using
GIS methods to map the vegetation (Moat & Smith
2007). This bilingual work, in cooperation with twenty
Malagasy and international organisations, mapped
protected areas, climate, vegetation and geology. Since
only 18 percent of the vegetation of Madagascar
remains intact, this sort of work is vital for the
conservation of the remainder.
Conservation Education
Undoubtedly conservation education has been one
of the most important contributions of Kew to the
field of conservation. Many people from many
nations have studied at the Seed Bank or taken
the Plant Conservation Techniques courses which
began to operate in 1993 with the first nine
participants. The first conservation techniques
course was coordinated by Michael Maunder and
since then eight more have been run with a total of
84 participants from 45 countries. Also a number of
regional courses have been run in key countries.
The international diploma course in Plant Conser-
vation Strategies and Botanic Garden Education is
always over-subscribed. Conservation is an integral
part of the Kew Diploma in Horticulture and of all
its MSc and Ph.D. programmes. These courses are
helping to build conservation capacity in many parts
of the world. So far 377 participants from 103
countries have participated in Kew’s training
courses and the Seed bank has trained 1400 people
from more than fifty countries.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSERVATION AT THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW
Scientific Research, the Underpinning
of Conservation at Kew
Kew has been a major contributor to conservation
mainly because of its excellence in scientific research.
It is the long history of research in taxonomy,
economic botany, cytology and more recently molec-
ular genetics and systematics that has equipped the
institution to provide so much of the scientific data
that are essential for meaningful conservation. With-
out this basic research effort and all the data that it
provides little could have been done. It is vital that this
sort of work continues in order to underpin future
work in conservation and sustainable use of plants. An
indication of the link between taxonomy and con-
servation is that all monographs produced by Kew are
now required to indicate the IUCN conservation
category for all species included. Without data on the
identification and distribution of species it would be
impossible to assess the levels of threat to species and
it is the work of the taxonomists in the herbarium that
provides these types of data. The development of the
CITES expertise at Kew has hinged on the science and
library resources, particularly for such groups as
orchids, succulents and bulbs. Several Kew staff are
active members of IUCN specialist groups that assess
the status of rare plants.
An historic tool that is so useful to conservation is
the Index Kewensis that was established from funds
made available from the will of Charles Darwin. More
recently this has evolved into the International Plant
Names Index (IPNI, www.ipni.org).
Practising Conservation at home
As scientific work on conservation has increased at
Kew there has also been an increasing and important
emphasis of setting the example at home. This has led
to such things as better conservation of resources,
recycling, better composting facilities, giving up the
use of peat as a growing medium, integrated pest
management, waste management, solar parking
meters and interpretation panels and best practise in
the use of timber in the Buildings and Maintenance
Department. Conservation of the wildlife of Kew and
Wakehurst is now better managed. At Kew this has led
to conservation programmes for butterflies, dragon
flies and great crested newts. The recording and data
basing of wildlife at Kew by Sandra Bell is an
important example to all. The Banks building with its
turf roof and heat pumps was an early example of
environmental building. This project was not easy to
achieve. It was initiated by Director Pat Brenan,
constructed under the directorship of Arthur Bell
and finally delivered early in my time as Director. This
time lag indicates that constructing a pioneer building
which was ahead of its time was not a simple matter.
507
Conclusions
What an impressive history! Building on its long
history the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is now
recognised as one of the leading centres for advice
and action on plant and fungal conservation. I am
delighted to see the increased emphasis on conserva-
tion that is occurring under the leadership of Stephen
Hopper as Director. Given the continued destruction
of habitat and the loss of species there is no doubt that
the fight to preserve the environment must continue
and indeed accelerate. It is good that Kew is now
making statements about climate change since it has
the data to convince the world that greater action is
needed. All conservation efforts will be in vain if we do
not stabilise the climate. I urge the current staff of Kew
to be active both in providing the scientific data to
convince the world and in spreading the message to a
wider audience through all of your educational
activities.
Now we have looked back at the past I hope that we
will look to the future for the rest of this conference.
The loss of species continues at an alarming rate and
so we must now concentrate on the solutions, both
scientific and political. The world faces decision time
as it attempts to address the issues of climate change.
All this work on conservation could be in vain of we do
not rapidly do something to halt climate change that is
changing habitats and causing further loss of species.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the information provided to me in
interviews by Colin Clubbe, Michael Fay, Madeline
Groves, John Lonsdale, Prof. Gren Lucas, Noel
McGough, Sara Oldfield, and China Williams, also to
Nigel Taylor, Noelia Alvarez and Jose Carlos Rodriguez
for information about the living collections at Kew and
to Andrew McRobb for providing me with some
photographs for the conference presentation.
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