8 March 2025
3 min read
International Women's Day 2025: our favourite Kew stories
Read and watch our top science and garden stories from the trailblazing women of Kew over the past year.
Kew’s women scientists, horticulturists, curators and educators are world-class, and it shows. We’ve rounded up our favourite stories from the women of Kew for a whistle-stop tour of the amazing work they've done over the past year.
Our film stars
On YouTube, Solene Dequiret, supervisor of the Princess of Wales Conservatory, introduced us to the plant that stumped the world’s most famous naturalist, the Darwin’s orchid.
Erin Messenger, Economic Botany collections manager, and assistant archivist Isabel Lauterjung didn’t shy away from the darker side of history in their deep dive into the Wardian case.
And botanical horticulturist Bryony Langley explained how rice grows and how we can protect it against climate change.
Curator mycologists Issy Miles-Bunch, Alex Dombrowski and Rosie Woods took us on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Fungarium – with special guest Bev, the cordyceps-infected tarantula.
In May, community horticultural learning co-ordinator Jane Rogers braved wet spring weather to promote Community Open Week and show our audience how to keep pests away using companion planting.
In December, Katherine Morton, trail curator for Wakehurst's Glow Wild festive light trail, set a Wakehurst record when she starred in their biggest ever social media hit: an Instagram tutorial on making a festive lantern, which currently has over 460,000 views.
Follow Wakehurst @wakehurst_kew and Kew Gardens @kewgardens on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and LinkedIn, and remember to tag us in your posts!
Arctic explorers
In Sweden, the MSB’s senior research leader for seed conservation Dr Elinor Breman led a team of scientists, including seed curator Sian McCabe, to collect 300,000 seeds from Arctic plants. Along for the ride was digital production manager Lydia Shellien-Walker, who produced the YouTube documentary Frö - Saving plant species beyond the Arctic Circle to chronicle their adventures in the downpour of an Arctic autumn.
Dr Breman was back in the Arctic a year later with seed processing assistant Anna Pajdo, whose blog Working in a winter wonderland is an illuminating read about what it’s like to work on Greenland’s remote Disko Island.
From Africa to Armenia
In rural Ethiopia, research assistant Sophie Jago was part of the team working to protect native enset, or “false banana”. Enset is an essential Ethiopian crop that’s resistant to climate change, but local farmers are under pressure to grow less resilient cash crops like maize instead. Sophie’s team worked with the farmers – especially women and older farmers - to grow rare types of enset and keep them around for generations to come.
In Madagascar, spatial analyst Jenny Williams explained how she flies drones and UAVs over Madagascar’s dry forests after intense fires to find the best areas to restore, in Five ways that Kew is helping to restore Madagascar’s dry forests.
And in Armenia, Dr Aisyah Faruk, conservation partnership co-ordinator for Oceania and Europe, and her research partner Astghik Papikyan of Nature Heritage, chronicled their years of conservation work by listing their top 4 favourite Armenian orchids – plus the story of the time Astghik came on a seed collecting trip with her three month old daughter in tow.
Read & watch
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