The world’s largest and most prestigious botanical garden, Kew receives 2 million visitors each year………. Shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, January 9, Nick Johnson, the 43-year-old manager of the conservatory …….. checked on the rarest, and most endangered, plant in the glasshouse, the Nymphaea thermarum, which is the smallest water lily in the world. Unlike some of the valuable orchids and cacti in the conservatory, which are kept behind glass screens, the tiny water lilies, whose white flowers measure less than 1cm across, were on open display, albeit in a relatively inaccessible position near the foot of a concrete bridge. There were 24 planted out in the mud. Today, [they] counted 23 – and a hole where the 24th had been.

The plant had been stolen. Johnson was furious. Mainly with himself: he had decided, the previous spring, to plant the water lily in the glasshouse. At the time, Kew possessed virtually the entire planet’s population of Nymphaea thermarum. The water lily had not been seen in its only known location in the wild, a thermal hot spring in Rwanda, since 2008, and it was one of around 100 plant species that now only survive in botanical gardens, on the very edge of extinction. Johnson had known the risks of putting such a scarce, and delicate, species on public view. People swipe the occasional flower and cutting from botanical gardens – they always have.

Author: Sam Knight

Source: The Guardian

To read the full article, click here

To read BBC covereage of the theft, click here