Royal Horticultural Society

The Royal Horticultural Society is the UK’s leading gardening charity.

The RHS promotes horticulture through its five gardens at Wisley (Surrey), Hyde Hall (Essex), Harlow Carr (North Yorkshire), Rosemoor (Devon) and Bridgewater (Greater Manchester); and at flower shows including the Chelsea Flower Show, Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, Tatton Park Flower Show and Cardiff Flower Show; community gardening schemes; Britain in Bloom and a vast educational programme.
Courses include landscape design, the life cycle of trees and planting in the right places. Bursaries are available to improve accessibility to these courses.

The Society also encourages biodiversity and plant conservation through:

• Optimising and realising the genetic potential of ornamental horticultural crops to benefit the environment and human health
• Understanding and promoting the benefits, use and conservation of plant genetic resources in UK gardens
• Providing a single, authoritative source for the naming and classification of UK cultivated plants
• Improving identification and description of garden plants

Britain’s gardens are unique and distinctive thanks to a remarkable, rich array of cultivated ornamental plants. However, their diversity is poorly documented and their contributions to the environment, society and the economy are not well understood.

Each of the 400,000 different kinds of garden plants in the UK, provide cultural, environmental and socio-economic benefits such as, localised cooling, mitigating flooding and wellbeing benefits. By researching garden plants, the Society can maximise their benefits and improve the environment, human health and wellbeing.