About Plant Heritage
Many of our once loved garden plants are quietly vanishing forever.
Once a garden plant is lost to cultivation, it's lost forever.
We keep rare plants growing…
As plants fall out of fashion or are superseded, vital genetic traits could simply vanish, unless they are taken into care and shared with others. If the expertise to grow and propagate them is also lost, our ability to properly conserve our unique garden flora is placed under significant threat.
Plant Heritage was formed to help minimise this risk across Britain and Ireland, to ensure our incredible diversity of cultivated plants, whether for food, medicine, ornament or heritage, remains available for the enjoyment and use of generations to come.
How do we achieve this?
• Holders of more than 600 National Plant Collections® around the UK search out and grow the widest range of their special interest plant group, identifying, documenting and conserving them in private gardens, allotments, nurseries, local parks, botanic gardens and historic estates.
• Our Threatened Plants Project is working to identify garden-worthy plants with the highest risk of extinction, with the ambition that these can be conserved in National Plant Collections and our Plant Guardian scheme.
• As a membership organisation, our network of local groups, from Cornwall to Scotland, organises activities to keep plant variety in our gardens.
• By becoming a Plant Guardian, our members can become personally involved in saving some of these rare plants in their own gardens.
• By offering and receiving rare plants through our free annual Plant Exchange. Every year approximately 1,000 rare and unusual plants go to new homes across the country, keeping them in cultivation and safe for future generations.
However, all this costs money. We are a self-funding charitable organisation doing all we can with our limited resources; we raise funds from sponsors and from the activities we organise nationally and through our enthusiastic local groups and their members.
But we need your help to ensure that this important conservation work can continue. Donate or become a member and join us today.