Our Living Collection of cultivated plants comprise some 14,000 individual accessions and over 8,000 taxa, distributed across our 16 hectare landscape. The Living Collection Portal is intended to support the search requirements of professional researchers, educators, conservationists, horticulturalists. You can search by species name, by a variety of higher taxonomic ranks, by global conservation status, by provenance, and by accession number. You can also filter to remove cultivar and hybrid species, and so constrain your search to biological species only. To facilitate your own data wrangling, all search outputs are downloadable as a csv file which can then be imported into a variety of software programs such as Microsoft Excel. If you have more advanced search requirements, please contact the curation team: curation@botanic.cam.ac.uk. The Living Collection Portal is also designed to allow you to request access to material if you are eligible (see important notes about requesting material).
Search our Living Collections
Request list (0)Important notes about requesting material
Our Living Collections are freely searchable by researchers, educators, conservationists, horticulturalists as well as interested members of the public. Our Living Collection Portal also enables you to select and then directly request material from our Living Collections. However, we will only supply material from our collections to official representatives of botanic gardens, universities and scientific institutions for utilisation in the areas of scientific research, education, conservation, and horticulture. We will not be able to supply material to private collectors, private gardens, or private gardeners, except in exceptional circumstances. Please contact the curation team to discuss any such exceptional requests before attempting to request material through this portal: curation@botanic.cam.ac.uk
Specific epithet?
“Specific epithet” refers to the second element in the Latin binomial name of a species, which follows the generic name and distinguishes the species from others in the same genus. For example, in the species Cannabis sativa, the word sativa is the specific epithet.
Higher grouping?
“Higher grouping” refers to a set of higher taxonomic categories above the level of order. Here we recognise five higher groupings: Angiosperms, Bryophytes, Gymnosperms, Ferns, and Lycophytes. Angiosperms refers to the flowering plants as defined by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APGIII, 2009)1. Bryophytes include Mosses, Liverworts and Hornworts. Ferns include Psilotales, Ophioglossales, Marattiales, Equisetales and Leptosporangiate ferns as defined by Christenhusz et al. (2011a)2. Gymnosperms includes Cycadales, Ginkgoales, Welwitschiales, Gnetales, Ephedrales, Pinales, Araucariales, and Cupressales, as defined by Christenhusz et al. (2011b)3. Lycophytes includes Lycopodiales, Isoetales, and Selaginellales, as defined by Christenhusz et al. (2011a)
1. APGII (2009) An update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants: APGIII. Botanical Journal of the Linnaean Society: 161, 105-121.
2. Christenhusz et al. (2011a) A linear sequence of extant families and genera of lycophytes and ferns. Phytotaxa: 19, 7-54.
3. Christenhusz et al. (2011b) A new classification and linear sequence of extant gymnosperms. Phytotaxa: 19, 55-70.
Conservation status?
Conservation status refers to whether a plant species is threatened with extinction in their native habitat. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is a global conservation group that researches threatened species and coordinates conservation action. The conservation status is based on scientific information and analyses from specialist groups, which is then published in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. As defined by the IUCN there are different categories of extinction risk.
- Extinct: after exhaustive surveys, the last known individual has died.
- Extinct in the wild: when a species survives in captivity, cultivation, or has a naturalised population well outside its former range.
- Critically endangered: when a species faces extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.
- Endangered: when a species faces a very high risk of extinction in the wild.
- Vulnerable: when a species faces a high risk of extinction in the wild.
- Least concern: when a species is widespread and abundant.
- Data deficient: when there is not enough information to assess the risk of extinction (based on distribution or population status)
- Not evaluated: when a species has not yet been evaluated against the IUCN criteria.
Extinct in the wild, critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable species are collectively termed ‘All threatened’ in the context of our collections and are collectively searchable using this term in the Living Collection Portal.
Provenance?
Provenance refers to the place of origin of an accession and/or a record of the ownership of an accession prior to its entry into the Living Collections. We have four broad categories of provenance, by which you can search:
- Garden Origin: transferred from another garden, nursery, or commercial outfit.
- Wild Origin: obtained directly from a wild population.
- Wild-derived: derived from wild-origin, second generation or more.
- Unknown: unknown origin.
Accession number?
The accession number links an accessioned plant and/or its derivatives to data collected about the accession. The accession number is crucial for identifying a plant, and for retrieving the origin and subsequent history of the accession within our collections. Each accession number identifies a plant, or group of plants that fulfil the following criteria: of the same taxon, of the same propagule type, were received from the same source, awere received at the same time. The accession number consists of eight digits. The first four digits represent the year the material was accessioned, and the last four the sequential item number in that year. e.g. 19480095 Metasequoia glyptostroboides, was the ninety fifth accession received in 1948. Plants that predate accessioning, such as old trees, or plants that have lost their accession number, are given artificial accession numbers starting with 1000. e.g. 10005838 Cedrus libani.