Introduction

The living orchid collection at Kew consists of nearly 10 000 accessions (many of them represented by more than one plant) with around 370 genera and 3500 species represented. The collection comes under the Tropical department and is housed in the Lower Nursery, where eight separate environments are maintained for growing orchids. These range from high temperature/high humidity regimes for growing tropical species, to low temperature environments for growing temperate and high altitude species, with varying degrees of temperature, light and humidity inbetween. The plants are cared for by a team of four members of staff, together with a horticultural student and occasionally international trainees.

We attempt to grow as wide a range of genera and species as possible, to illustrate the extraordinary diversity of the family. Of course we can only hope to grow a small representation of the huge number that exist in the wild, so we must be careful that those we do find space for are fulfilling a useful purpose and are not simply grown ‘for the sake of it’.

Each plant is labelled with an accession number (a ten figure number) which is recorded on the Kew computer together with data such as the donor or collector, its country of origin and range, flowering time, habit of growth, etc. This data is easily retrieved and is of use both to botanists' and horticulturists' research programmes.