Welcome to the Kew Economic Botany Collection - online database

The Economic Botany Collection (EBC) is one of the largest collections of specimens at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. It contains about 90,000 plant raw materials and artefacts representing all aspects of craft and daily life worldwide, including medicines, textiles, basketry, dyes, gums and resins, foods and woods. The Collection was founded in 1847 as the Museum of Economic Botany and continues to grow by about 800 accessions each year. Further information is available on the EBC web pages. Simple searches can be initiated from this page. Please refer to the help pages for advice as to how to formulate database queries. Advanced search options are also available. Please contact us if you have ideas as to how we can improve this site.