A conservatory of rare & endangered plants · est. 1873
We keep their lines unbroken — hand-pollinated with a sable brush, propagated on the bench, counted every morning. Adopt one, and its next generation carries your name.
The living collection
No photographs — a camera flatters a plant, a plate measures it. Every drawing on this page was made from the specimen it depicts, and every accession number is a promise that someone is responsible for it.
Every Wood’s cycad on Earth is male, and a clone of a single tree found in the oNgoye Forest in 1895. Ours included. Until a female is found, the species cannot set seed — so we keep the line alive by offset, one pup at a time.
Carried from China in 1804 and promptly lost to cultivation everywhere. Two mature plants are known to survive; our stock descends from cuttings of the Chiswick line. It flowers a deep rose — never red — every February.
Described in 2009 from a single Palawan summit, with pitchers big enough to drown a rat. Poaching has made every wild plant countable. Ours grow from legally exported seed and sulk unless the night drops below 12 °C.
No one has seen it wild since 1803. Every Franklin tree alive descends from seed the Bartrams collected on the Altamaha River a generation earlier — a rescue made before anyone knew it was one.
Blooms for forty-eight hours a decade, smells precisely of carrion, and draws a queue around the block each time. Our specimen, “Humphrey,” last flowered in 2023. The night it opened, 4,100 people filed past.
Plates VII–XLII
Thirty-six more plates hang in the long corridor, from a ghost orchid that refuses soil to a St Helena ebony grown from one of two surviving bushes. The corridor is drawn at walking pace.
See them in personAdopt a species
Adoption is how the glasshouse pays for heat, mist and the keepers’ hours. Each species holds sixty places. Choose your plant, choose your tier — each one is named for how we propagate.
£6/month
Where every collection starts.
£14/month
A living piece of the work.
£36/month
A seat at the bench.
Adoptions renew monthly and cancel anytime — the plant, of course, stays. 100% of membership goes to the living collection.
Visit the glasshouse
Eighty per cent humidity, twenty-four degrees, the smell of wet earth and something always in flower. Leave the coat at the door; the plants have first claim on the climate.