Visit to the Herbarium at Kew Gardens

Wax model of an orchid

This weekend is Open London weekend, a time when all sorts of places not normally open to the public allow people to visit. I chose to visit the herbarium at Kew, a magnificent eighteenth century building with a high ceiling and a spiral staircase painted glossy red at one end that leads to the balconies stacked one above the other on either side of the room. These balconies house the upper layers of the collection in white painted floor to ceiling cupboards that jut out from the wall, forming internal walls which end abruptly just before the edge of the balconies. 

 Wax model of an orchid

When I visited the herbarium twenty five years ago I was taken up the staircase to meet some of the old retired botanists who devoted their free time to the classification of specimens in the collection. Each man (for they were all men) sat  at a table between the cupboards, busy with his magnifying glass, pencils and paper. The whole building was suffused with a quiet air of concentration. This time I was in the midst of a group of people led by a Kew Garden expert botanist, all eagerly asking questions. There was no question of ascending the spiral staircase or meeting the old retired botanists.

The people working in Kew are seriously concerned about the tragic loss of plant species, for their work is to name and classify the world's plants. In addition to this they are actively engaged in plant and ecosystem conservation. 

Botanists from Kew are constantly discovering new plant species. It's very important that they collect specimens of these new plants, which they preserve in a press, together with a detailed description of the exact place where they find them.

I'm afraid I didn't manage to get the whole title in. It says 

28,187 plant species are currently recorded as being of medicinal use. 

https://stateoftheworldsplants.com/2017/useful-plants.html

In many parts of the world, especially rural Africa and South America, people still rely on plant medicine. In 2016 the Chinese government, who recognise the importance of plant based medicine, 

announced that they intended to incorporate Traditional Chinese Medicine into their healthcare system by 2020. In 2003 the World Health Organisation estimated that the annual global market for herbal medicines is worth sixty billion dollars. In China 10,000-11,250 plant species are used as medicine but only 563 are listed in the Chinese Pharmacopeia. Botanists at Kew are involved with the conservation of medicinal plants.