Talk:Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

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Page scope

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is about the institution as a holder of Cannabis material, in its Herbarium (K) and its Economic Botany Collection. The sheets and objects themselves have their own accession and artefact pages, and the article lists them.

Sourcing

The institutional facts come from Kew's own website and annual report, the statute that governs it, its government framework document and Index Herbariorum. The cannabis material comes from Kew's catalogues, the data it publishes through GBIF, and a 2020 taxonomic paper. Discuss attribution, independent sourcing and any claim that has lost its attribution here.

Discussion

Source discrepancies

Each divergence is reported as the source gives it.

The move from the Crown to the government

Kew's History of Kew: 1840, with William Hooker appointed director the same year.
Kew's The Herbarium: Hooker was appointed director in 1841.
Index Herbariorum: "Funded as a government institution in 1841".

Size of the Herbarium

The Herbarium: around seven million preserved vascular plant specimens, undated.
The Annual Report for 2025–26: herbarium and fungarium together about 7.4 million.
Kew's Data Portal launch story (28 May 2025): 7.5 million herbarium and fungarium specimens. Index Herbariorum: 7,350,000.

Type specimens

The Herbarium and the notes of the Index Herbariorum record: 330,000.
The Index Herbariorum field typeSpecimensTotal: 421,400.
Kew's GBIF dataset description: "over 300,000 putative type and historically important specimens".

Digitisation

The Data Portal's About page: about one million records digitised, with a target of March 2026.
The launch story of 28 May 2025: five million.
The Annual Report: digitisation of 7.4 million records completed in 2025–26. The article uses the report.

Size of the Economic Botany Collection

The database's home page: about 90,000 items, growing by about 800 a year.
Nesbitt: 95,000, growing by some 2,000 a year.
Kew's collection page: over 100,000 objects, about 2,000 a year. The Annual Report: about 100,000 items. The article uses the report.

Number of Cannabis entries

GBIF: 123 entries for the genus Cannabis that carry Kew's institution code.
Kew's own occurrence service: 160 Cannabis entries.

Licences

GBIF: both Kew datasets under CC BY 4.0. The Economic Botany Collection's help page: "CC-BY", with no version. The Data Portal: images under CC-BY 4.0.
Kew's own occurrence service gives the licence of all 160 Cannabis entries as "other".

The Wallich sheets

Kew's data mark the ten sheets of number 4665 as "Unknown Type Material"; GBIF interprets this as "OriginalMaterial". No source says what name they would be type material for.
McPartland and Small list several of them as representative specimens, not as types.
The Burma sheet: Kew gives the year 1826; the supplementary file gives 24 November 1826. Kew gives no date for the Bareilly sheets; the supplementary file gives 1796.

Other sheets

Traill's sheet from the lower Amazon (K001202656): Kew dates it 10 April 1974. The supplementary file lists "Traill, VI.1874 (K, sinsemilla specimen)" with no barcode. No source says they are the same sheet. The article does not mention it.
Hooker's Moroccan sheet (K001604462): Kew dates it 1 April 1871. The supplementary file lists "South Marocco - J.D.Hooker - IV-V.1871 (K)" among collections it could not assign. No source says they are the same sheet.

The isoneotype

The only data entry for Kew's isoneotype of var. himalayensis is a copy in the Tropicos dataset, owned by the Missouri Botanical Garden but carrying Kew's institution code. It is in neither of Kew's own datasets nor in Kew's occurrence service. That Kew holds an isoneotype rests on McPartland and Small (2020), who list "isoneotypes (BM! K! LE! US!)". Éloise 23:49, 4 October 2026 (+07)

Editorial treatment

Title. With the comma, as in the National Heritage Act 1983 and Kew's own usage.
The Economic Botany count. The 106 records the database lists under Cannabis include 97 hemp-family records. The 221 it lists under hemp add 12 records catalogued only to the family, 109 in all. By the catalogue's own use categories the 109 are fibres (62), materials such as paper (4), fuels (2), wood (1), medicines (1) and unclassified (39). The records it lists under ganja (33) and bhang (1) include no hemp-family record, and it lists none under charas or hashish; the 33 under ganja are other plants.
Dates in the Economic Botany Collection. The database records donor dates and Entry Book Numbers, which date an acquisition, not a collection. Donor years are given as the years objects were given.
The pipe. The catalogue files it to the family only, so it is absent from GBIF's Cannabis entries. It has its own artefact page. Éloise 23:49, 4 October 2026 (+07)