Sir Harold's virtual shed

National Plant Collections

A National Plant Collection is a comprehensive collection of a type of plant cultivated for conservation purposes. It may be a collection of a single genus of plants (and include all the species and cultivars within that genus), but can also comprise a scope of plants. This could be location, i.e. within a genus of plants a collection might be specific to plants that come from Asia, or attribute, i.e. the plants in a particular genus that have blue flowers. It could even be a historic plant for example, all the plants collected by Sir Harold Hillier could comprise their own National Collection.

Collections based on a scope are helpful, as sometimes collections can grow beyond the maintenance ability of those responsible for them. Narrowing a collection's scope to plants of a specific kind offers the ability to focus on preserving the best qualities of each plant. However, if a collection holder has the resource to maintain larger collections, they may wish to expand upon previously narrowed scopes. This was the case for the Gardens' pine collection, which used to just be Pinus species but expanded to include their excellent collection of dwarf pines.

There are three categories of National Collection: reference, horticultural and scientific. Our collections are reference collections, meaning that people can use them to gather information about different qualities of each plant, or how we care for them. Horticultural collections are purely collections of plants usually ornamental with little offered in the way of information, whereas scientific collections are used for scientific research.

There can be an assumption that National Collections only contain cultivars, but this isn't the case - there are collections that incorporate wild plants too. That doesn't mean, however, that collection holders are able to go and raid the wild to bolster their collections; there are boundaries in place for the way wild plants are collected.