The Art of Plant Evolution opens at Kew in March

The Art of Plant Evolution will run daily from 5 March to 5 September 2027 at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art in Kew Gardens, London. Entry to the exhibition is included with admission to Kew Gardens, while a £1 Universal Credit ticket and a £10 ticket for visitors aged 16 to 29 are available. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew recommends booking online in advance through kew.org.

The exhibition is aimed at a broad audience, but its combination of detailed artwork, historic objects and current scientific research will be particularly relevant to visitors interested in natural history, botany and botanical art.

Dates, venue and admission at a glance

No daily opening time, event-specific accessibility information or dedicated transport guidance was included in the announcement. Visitors planning their journey should check Kew Gardens’ current visitor information before booking.

More than 150 artworks follow the Plant Tree of Life

The exhibition brings together more than 150 works by 80 contemporary botanical artists from around the world. Featured artists include Coral Guest, Paul Jones, Susannah Blaxill, Phansakdi Chakkaphak, Rosie Sanders and Mariko Imai.

Rather than arranging the works only by artist or visual style, the gallery will mirror the evolutionary groups represented in the Plant Tree of Life. Algae, mosses, ferns and flowering plants are among the groups used to show how plant families are connected and how species have evolved over millions of years.

The approach turns the exhibition into a visual route through plant diversity. Botanical art supplies the close observation and recorded detail, while research from Kew Science provides the evolutionary framework.

Darwin letters and fossils add a historical thread

Artworks from the Shirley Sherwood Collection will appear alongside material from scientific and archival collections. The displays will include letters written by Charles Darwin in 1833 during the Beagle voyage and a rarely shown, hand-drawn sketch of Gavilea patagonica, an orchid he collected in the field.

Fossils on loan from the Natural History Museum will add another layer to the account of plant evolution. Together, the objects trace how illustration has helped researchers record, compare and understand plants across centuries.

The exhibition is curated by Shirley Sherwood, with contributions from William Baker, a senior research leader at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and John Kress, distinguished scientist and curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution.

The science behind the gallery layout

Kew scientists have been working on the flowering Plant Tree of Life since 2015, using genomic sequencing to map relationships between plants. According to Kew, the wider Plant and Fungal Tree of Life project involves more than 500 scientists and has sampled 96% of the 13,700 genera of flowering plants.

Researchers have analysed DNA data generated from more than 20,000 samples. That information helps scientists identify species, examine how plants adapted to environmental change and investigate which plants could contribute to drought-tolerant crops or future medicines.

Visitors can continue exploring those relationships in Kew’s Agius Evolution Garden, where individual garden rooms represent branches of the Tree of Life. An accompanying audio guide was created with Bloomberg Connects.

Kew Publishing also plans a second edition of The Art of Plant Evolution to accompany the exhibition. Written by John Kress and Shirley Sherwood, it will use more than 170 species from the Shirley Sherwood Collection to present the latest flowering-plant family framework through botanical art. Online pre-booking remains Kew’s recommended next step for visitors seeking the best-value admission.

Source: Royal Botanic Gardens Kew Press and Media