ROOM TO GROW

That’s the thing with plants: they just keep growing. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is home to the largest and most diverse collection of plants and fungi in the world. In an ever-evolving field of research where comprehensiveness is impossible, the fact that Kew’s Herbarium alone is home to around 95 per cent of all vascular plants in the world – some seven million specimens – is simply staggering.

“Kew occupies a very special place in the science of botany,” says the BBC broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough. “In some circumstances, the only way you can prove that a particular species is that species is