Blooming brilliant

Originally a means of keeping a living record of garden plants, our 722 National Plant Collections-of everything from Abies to Zingiber-set the gold standard across the world. Charles Quest-Ritson meets some of the expert collection holders

- Charles Quest

PLANT HERITAGE was founded in 1978 and has become a powerful influence—wholly for good—within the world of horticulture. It arose from the realisation that many good garden plants had been lost to cultivation. In those pre-internet days, when even the RHS's annual Plant Finder did not exist, the only way to find a plant was to comb through piles of nursery catalogues, often fruitlessly.

The founders were expert plantsmen, including Chris Brickell, Graham Stuart Thomas and Lawrence Banks. Each of them understood the need to conserve rare plants and to make them more accessible. The aims of Plant Heritage were—and still are—to ‘document, promote and make available Britain and Ireland's rich biodiversity of garden plants for the benefit of everyone through horticulture, education and science’.

There are many ways to promote these aims, but one of the most successful has been the system of National Plant Collections. Members of Plant Heritage—they may be organisations, such as the National Trust, professional nurserymen or keen individuals—adopt a genus or type of plant and do their utmost to rediscover and reintroduce endangered species and cultivars by collecting, propagating, distributing and writing about them. The King has a National Collection of beeches (Fagus species and cultivars) at Highgrove in Gloucestershire.

In the early days, the system of National Collections was fairly casually run. Holders were trusted to get on with making a collection, researching old cultivars and giving away rare plants. Today, there are stringent requirements for documenting, labelling, and propagating the collections. Right from the start, the collection holders also are encouraged to consider the problem of succession—who will take over the collection from me when I give up?