Most people know Kew only as a public garden with very special greenhouses and other buildings. Few visitors realise that it is a scientific institution with research laboratories, a great herbarium and archives of all descriptions. In the context of this symposium the living collections in the Gardens are unlikely to be applicable as an archive, although there are many specimens of great historical interest, including the world's oldest greenhouse plant (Encephalartos Iongifolius) which is an African species brought from Natal by Mason in the 1770s.

Over five million dried specimens are housed here in systematic order. They have been received from collectors all over the world during the last two centuries. The Herbarium is especially rich in tropical African collections, including Nigerian. For example those from Theodor Vogel's Niger Expedition of 1841 formed the basis of Hooker's Niger Flora (1849).