LECTURE

PARADISE TRANSPLANTED Series
Organised by Dr Jennifer Gunning; sponsored by Buro Happold

THE HERBARIUM AT KEW

A Lecture by Professor Simon Owens, Keeper of the Herbarium, on 18 June 1998

Professor Owens attended the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the University of Reading. He is Special Professor in Life Science at the University of Nottingham.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Surrey, with its associated property at Wakehurst Place, Sussex, which is rented from the National Trust, have changed considerably over the last 15 years since they became an NDPB - non-departmental public body - instead of being part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. One consequence has been the rise in the admission charge to the gardens from 1d to £5!, but the RBG now has to raise 32% of its financial requirement of £28m a year, instead of the 2% previously. It is not primarily a pleasure garden but a scientific establishment working on systematic botany, with 550 staff and 300 volunteers, which explains the cost of running it. Amongst the staff are 13 botanical artists producing illustrations, reminiscent of Sydney Parkinson on HMS Endeavour, as described in the previous Paradise Transplanted lecture.
The herbarium was established in 1852 in Hunter House by Sir William Hooker and contains about 7 million plant and fungal specimens amalgamated from numerous collections, including Broome's fungal collection, although his plant collection was left to the BRLSI and is now being catalogued here. The oldest specimen is an olive from Tutankhamen's tomb. It is the second largest herbarium in Europe after Paris, which has only 12 staff but 8 million specimens. The herbarium uses its specimens for scientific research in genetics, conservation of plant species, discovery of useful products such as essential oils and for training many staff from all over the world in scientific techniques. It publishes 10 -15 books a year and hundreds of scientific papers.
There is also a library of 75,000 volumes and a collection of plant products - from a shirt made of banana fibres to a medieval fish trap from Bristol - of 80,000 objects.
Collecting specimens from tropical countries continues but is now subject to agreements with the country of origin about the commercial exploitation of the results, so that they share in any profits. On such an expedition it is likely that 20% of the specimens collected will be previously unknown.
Professor Owens has carried out research on orchids, of which Kew has 12,000, and explained the relationship between the orchid and a fungus, containing a virus which enters the cell and is essential to provide the orchid with nutrient.
In the discussion the genetic modification of plants to resist herbicides was raised. The speaker gave his personal opinion that an increase in food production was necessary in view of the growth of population, but that genetically-modified food should be labelled and the release of genes into the wild was still a potential hazard about which very little was known. There is no ‘emergency team’ to investigate sudden occurrences of disease, such as Dutch Elm, which devastated the species quickly. Dutch Elm disease was such a disaster because all the trees in the country were clones, so if one caught the disease there was no genetic diversity to prevent all the others doing so. The same may be true for bamboos, which have suffered similarly recently. However, the enormous number of plant species, of which we know only a few (about 60,000 out of 1½ million) makes it extremely difficult to set up ‘emergency teams’ able to cover all and every such disease before it strikes.

Don Lovell