A decade ago, when Dr. Diazgranados was head of Bogotá’s botanical garden, he took on the construction of a new herbarium and the largest greenhouse in the Americas, before a change in mayoral administrations swept out its leadership and he packed his bags for London. He published a world checklist of useful plants, a virtually boundless, searchable database of species that supply food, medicine, fiber and fuel, or help mitigate the effects of climate change. “What I need to do now is figure out how this institution can respond better to these challenges.”Dr. Diazgranados’s offices are in the garden’s glass-walled plant research laboratory, nestled in an old-growth oak forest. Here, researchers draw on collections of resins, seeds and plants preserved in spirits or in silica powder, along with vast banks of DNA samples and plant chemicals. The bridge between the botanical garden as a public attraction and a research facility is its living collection, whose plants are routinely sampled to help answer questions in plant genetics, structure and evolution.

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Persons: Diazgranados, ”, ” Dr Organizations: Royal Botanic, New Locations: Americas, London, Kew, Colombia, Peru