After several failed attempts, botanist Richard Lewis has managed to collect seeds of the only endemic Falklands plant missing from an important collection at Kew.

‘I was thrilled to find large stands of the silvery buttercup (Hamadryas argentea) in a few remote valleys on Weddell Island,’ he says in Kew’s UK Overseas Territories blog. ‘I had tried to collect seeds of this species several times before in other parts of the Falklands but always been defeated.

‘Once a cold spring had made the plant flower late, another time the plants only had male flowers, so no seeds were set, and a third time some goats had escaped from a nearby farm and eaten all the female flowers.’

All thirteen of the Falklands’ unique plant species are now being preserved in low temperatures at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank.

Read the full post here.