Dr Stephan Gale and Candy Ip Tsz Yu of KFBG with the coveted Floral Gold Medal at the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Chelsea Flower Show
An exhibition displaying Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden’s (KFBG) orchid conservation work has been awarded a Floral Gold Medal at the prestigious 2025 Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Chelsea Flower Show in London. The vibrant exhibit, which received a visit from Queen Camilla herself, showcased the beauty and fragility of the region’s native orchids to a global audience, and highlighted its importance for biodiversity.
The show, organised by the UK’s RHS and with a history stretching back more than 100 years, ran from 20-25 May 2025. KFBG was honoured to be invited by Orchid Conservation Chelsea to be one of four displays, alongside those from Singapore, Hawaii and Australia. Under the theme ‘From Hong Kong to Australia — The Orchids of Asia & the Pacific’, the collaboration aimed to tell the story of how science and horticulture have joined forces to save species from extinction.
The KFBG booth at the Chelsea Flower Show, a naturalistic diorama recreating a Hong Kong mountain stream, the natural habitat for many native orchids
The KFBG booth was transformed into a boulder-strewn mountain stream typical of Hong Kong’s ravines, replete with the mossy rocks, shaded understorey and evergreen canopy that our native orchids call home. Within this lush, naturalistic diorama, an abundance of orchids native to Hong Kong and South China were interspersed. Among them were plants propagated from seed every year at KFBG’s micropropagation laboratory and recently donated to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, including Ruy’s Ania (Ania ruybarrettoi), the Long-eared Dog Orchid (Bulbophyllum bicolor), and the Chinese Rattlesnake Orchid (Pholidota chinensis).
A star of the show: The Long-eared Dog Orchid (Bulbophyllum bicolor). The exhibit highlighted KFBG’s decade-long “race to protect” this rare native species, which faces reproductive failure in the wild. The display tells the story of how our conservation science, from micropropagation to assisted pollination, is creating new generations to restore wild populations and safeguard the orchid from extinction
This achievement is built on a legacy of pioneering work that began at KFBG in the 1970s. Lifelong Hong Kong plantswoman Gloria D’Almada Barretto and Professor Shiu-ying Hu of the Chinese University of Hong Kong documented many new orchid species across the territory’s rugged terrain. Over the ensuing decades, as awareness grew of the vulnerability of Hong Kong’s landscape and the threat of illegal collection, a new generation of KFBG staff took up the mantle. The mission evolved from documentation to active conservation, researching orchid ecology and developing methods to propagate and reintroduce them into the wild. Today, specialist ecologists and horticulturalists at KFBG propagate scores of threatened local orchid species from seed, making use of a specially designed orchid micropropagation laboratory, a culture room and three orchid nurseries.
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