Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. An internationally important botanical research and education institution, it employs 1,100 staff. Its board of trustees is chaired by Dame Amelia Fawcett.
A botanical garden or botanic garden is a garden with a documented collection of living plants for the purpose of scientific research, conservation, display, and education. Typically plants are labelled with their botanical names. It may contain specialist plant collections such as cacti and other succulent plants, herb gardens, plants from particular parts of the world, and so on; there may be greenhouses, shadehouses, again with special collections such as tropical plants, alpine plants, or other exotic plants. Most are at least partly open to the public, and may offer guided tours, educational displays, art exhibitions, book rooms, open-air theatrical and musical performances, and other entertainment.
Joseph Marie Henry Alfred Perrier de la Bâthie was a French botanist who specialized in the plants of Madagascar.
Olea capensis, the black ironwood, is an African tree species in the olive family Oleaceae. It is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa: from the east in Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, south to the tip of South Africa, and west to Cameroon, Sierra Leone and the islands of the Gulf of Guinea, as well as Madagascar and the Comoros. It occurs in bush, littoral scrub and evergreen forest.
"Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute", renamed in the fond memory of visionary Prime Minister of India Shri Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is an autonomous Institute established by the Government of Kerala on 17 November 1979 at Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of Kerala. It functions under the umbrella of the Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment (KSCSTE), Government of Kerala. The Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG), Kew played an exemplary and significant role in shaping and designing the lay out of the JNTBGRI garden in its formative stages.
Stephen Donald Hopper AC FLS FTSE is a Western Australian botanist. He graduated in Biology, specialising in conservation biology and vascular plants. Hopper has written eight books, and has over 200 publications to his name. He was Director of Kings Park in Perth for seven years, and CEO of the Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority for five. He is currently Foundation Professor of Plant Conservation Biology at The University of Western Australia. He was Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 2006 to 2012.
The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, formerly known as the Millennium Seed Bank Project, is the largest ex situ plant conservation programme in the world coordinated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. After being awarded a Millennium Commission grant in 1995, the project commenced in 1996, and is now housed in the Wellcome Trust Millennium Building situated in the grounds of Wakehurst Place, West Sussex. Its purpose is to provide an "insurance policy" against the extinction of plants in the wild by storing seeds for future use. The storage facilities consist of large underground frozen vaults preserving the world's largest wild-plant seedbank or collection of seeds from wild species. The project had been started by Dr Peter Thompson and run by Paul Smith after the departure of Roger Smith. Roger Smith was awarded the OBE in 2000 in the Queen's New Year Honours for services to the Project.
Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) is a plant conservation charity based in Kew, Surrey, England. It is a membership organisation, working with 800 botanic gardens in 118 countries, whose combined work forms the world's largest plant conservation network.
Tahina spectabilis, the tahina palm, also called blessed palm or dimaka is a species of gigantic palm that is found only in the Analalava District of northwestern Madagascar where its range is only twelve acres, one of the most extreme examples of endemism known. It can grow 18 m (59 ft) tall and has palmate leaves over 5 m (16 ft) across. The trunk is up to twenty inches thick, and sculpted with the most conspicuous leaf scars of any tree. An individual tree was discovered when in flower in 2007; it was first described the following year as a result of photographs being sent to Kew Gardens in the United Kingdom for identification. The palm is thought to live for up to fifty years before producing an enormous inflorescence up to nineteen feet in height and width, surpassed in size only by Corypha spp. and by Metroxylon salomonense and being monocarpic subsequently dying. The inflorescence, a panicle, consists of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of three-flowered clusters which bloom in three consecutive, synchronized "cohorts" or flushes of bloom. The nearest equivalent pattern of flowering is in the flowering vine Bougainvillea where the three flowers bloom sequentially, but not synchronized. Fewer than one hundred adult individuals of the species are thought to exist and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has rated it as "critically endangered".
Senecio cedrorum is a shrub species of the genus Senecio and family Asteraceae and endemic to Madagascar.
Dendrobium bigibbum, commonly known as the Cooktown orchid or mauve butterfly orchid, is an epiphytic or lithophytic orchid in the family Orchidaceae. It has cylindrical pseudobulbs, each with between three and five green or purplish leaves and arching flowering stems with up to twenty, usually lilac-purple flowers. It occurs in tropical North Queensland, Australia and New Guinea.
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the herbarium, one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London's top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.
Angiopteris evecta, commonly known as the king fern, giant fern, elephant fern, oriental vessel fern, Madagascar tree fern, or mule's Foot fern, is a very large rainforest fern in the family Marattiaceae native to most parts of Southeast Asia and Oceania. It has a history dating back about 300 million years, and is believed to have the longest fronds of any fern in the world.
John Dransfield is an honorary research fellow and former head of palm research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, United Kingdom, as well as being an authority on the phylogenetic classification of palms.
Henk Jaap Beentje is a Dutch botanist. In 1978 he obtained a masters in biology at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD at the Wageningen Agricultural University on the thesis A monograph on Strophanthus DC. (Apocynaceae), prepared under the direction of Hendrik de Wit and A.J.M. Leeuwenberg, in 1982.
The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families was an "international collaborative programme that provides the latest peer reviewed and published opinions on the accepted scientific names and synonyms of selected plant families." Maintained by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, it was available online, allowing searches for the names of families, genera and species, as well as the ability to create checklists.
The flora of Madagascar consists of more than 12,000 species of plants, as well as a poorly known number of fungi and algae. Around 83% of Madagascar's vascular plants are found only on the island. These endemics include five plant families, 85% of the over 900 orchid species, around 200 species of palms, and such emblematic species as the traveller's tree, six species of baobab and the Madagascar periwinkle. The high degree of endemism is due to Madagascar's long isolation following its separation from the African and Indian landmasses in the Mesozoic, 150–160 and 84–91 million years ago, respectively. However, few plant lineages remain from the ancient Gondwanan flora; most extant plant groups immigrated via across-ocean dispersal well after continental break-up.
Michael Francis Fay is a British geneticist and botanist currently serving as Senior Research Leader, Conservation Genetics, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Arboretum d'Antsokay or Antsokay Arboretum is a botanical garden near the city of Toliara in Madagascar. About 900 plant species grow in the Arboretum, 90% of these endemic to Madagascar, 80% of them considered to have medicinal value and many threatened with extinction. Lonely Planet and Rough Guides both list the Arboretum as the top attraction in Toliara.
Johan Hermans is a British botanist specialising in orchids, and an Honorary Research Associate of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His The Orchids of Madagascar, described as "a now classic work", was published in a second edition in 2007.
