Kew Gardens' 10 favorite new species of 2024

Science never sleeps, and the indefatigable investigators at the world-renowned Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London, have had a particularly busy year. During 2024, working with partners worldwide, Kew scientists have revealed 172 new plants and fungi. That's nearly one every two days. 

As the year comes to a close, they've named 10 of their favorites – including fishy fungi, a lonely liana and a gene-jumping herb. It's sadly worth mentioning that several species on the list are already at risk of extinction due to human activities, so catch them while you can...

10. The Chinese liana threatened by cinnamon farming

Native from India to eastern Asia, Cheniella is a genus of tendrilled forest lianas in the bean family. Kew scientists collaborated with Chinese scientists to revise the family taxonomy and revealed three new species, all in southern China.

One of the new species, Cheniella longistaminea, flowers only at night and is pollinated by moths. Its native forest habitat has been threatened by trees planted for timber and carbon sequestration as well as Chinese cinnamon, the main source of cinnamon for the North American market.

9. A marzipan-scented liana named after a Guinean botanist

Keita deniseae is a new species and genus of African rainforest liana, characterized by the strong smell of marzipan given off by its roots and stems when scraped.

Collected in the Boyboyba forest of Guinea in West Africa, where the plant climbs into the canopy with strange, hooked structures and bears large, edible fruit, the plant's name honors its collector, Guinean botanist Denise Molmou. The genus Keita was also named after a Guinean scientist, the late Professor Sékou Moussa Keita.

8. Indonesia's orchid bonanza

Indonesia includes 17,000 spectacularly biodiverse islands, with species unknown to science. Kew has collaborated with local botanists to identify five spectacular new orchids from various sites across the archipelago. 

These include Coelogyne albomarginata from Sumatra, Coelogyne spinifera from Seram, Dendrobium cokronagoroi from West New Guinea, and two from West Papua Province – the endangered Mediocalcar gemma-coronae and the critically endangered Dendrobium wanmae.

7. Lonely liana threatened by cement

Not just a new species but a new genus, endemic to Vietnam, in the tropical liana family Malpighiaceae. The genus is named Chlorohiptage after its flowers, which are uniquely green rather than the usual yellow seen in the family.

It's a mystery, in that the Vietnamese and Kew authors do not yet know what kind of insect would pollinate these green flowers. They do, however, note that its limestone karst habitat is being cleared for quarries to make cement that is mostly sold overseas.

6. Three new 'tooth fungi' from the UK

Good news: Scientists consider fungi in the genus Phellodon, which has teeth-like structures instead of the more typical gills, to be an indicator of overall good quality forest habitat due to their sensitivity to nitrate pollution. Bad news: They're disappearing across Europe. 

Good news again: DNA sequencing has now revealed four new Phellodon species, three of which occur in the UK. There's Phellodon castaneoleucus, found near Royal Tunbridge Wells; Phellodon frondosoniger, identified near Windsor; and Phellodon aquiloniniger, found in Scottish pine forests such as Abernethy Forest.

5. The gene-jumping, rule-breaking herb

Botanists are abuzz about this new herb from the remote sandstone cliffs of the Fouta Djalon in Guinea. Virectaria stellata belongs to the family Rubiaceae, which has thousands of species – precisely none of which have featured this new one's star-shaped ('stellate') hairs.

The plot thickens: these hairs are a special type of stellate which occur in a group of species in an unrelated family, Acanthaceae. The theory is that the genes for producing stellate hairs may have jumped from one family to another, possibly via sap-feeding insects. Every day's a school day in botany. And science generally. 

4. A new African family with a feeding quirk

Most flowering plants have green leaves, using photosynthesis to make sugar from sunlight, then swapping some sugars with mycorrhizal fungi for minerals. But some plants have gone further, taking all their needs from the fungus, and only popping above ground to fruit and flower. 

Scientists have now named an entirely new family of plants with this peculiar feeding quirk – Afrothismiaceae, named after the genus Afrothismia. All these species are extremely rare or even extinct and most have only been recorded once. Of the named species, most appear in Cameroon.

3. The potential house plant called Black Soul

Many households worldwide include a Brazilian zebra plant (Aphelandra squarrosa). From the dry forests of north-west Colombia comes a new relative, locally called 'black soul' due to its dark heartwood and now named Aphelandra almanegra – the latter word combining the Spanish terms for soul and black.

A deciduous shrub, it grows up to 5 meters tall with potentially dozens of spectacular pink flowers 4 to 5 centimeters long, flowering from November to March. It's therefore a great potential house plant, which might save it – it's threatened by habitat clearance due to human activities.

2. Three new fishy fungi from Lapland and North America

Worldwide, there are about 800 described toadstool species in the genus Russula, recognized by their absence of a veil, their brittle gills, and their stalks that resemble apple flesh but often smell of fish.

DNA sequencing has now distinguished three new species of Russula that have long been a puzzle to separate. They're Russula lapponica from Lapland and Estonia; Russula neopascua, from the high Rockies in Colorado and Montana, U.S.; and Russula olympiana, with the same range as Russula neopascua but extending to the Pacific Northwest and British Colombia.

1. A 'ghost palm' discovery 90 years in the making

Finally, a ghost story. Despite the earliest-known herbarium specimen of this highly distinctive rattan or climbing palm – long used in western Borneo (Malaysia and Indonesia) by local Iban communities for basketry and for its edible young shoots – dating back over 90 years, this species has remained unnamed until now: Meet Plectocomiopsis hantu.

The name hantu is the Indonesian and Malay word for ghost. Why? Two reasons: First, the palm's ghostly appearance, with white undersides to the leaves and grey stems; and because scientifically it is mysterious and still incompletely known. A formal description does, however, mean it is now visible to future conservation efforts.