Plants are our lifeline – but we’re letting them die | Michael McCarthy

Human existence is utterly dependent on wild plant species we've shamefully neglected. Now Kew has become a global voice for plants

There seem to have been no national ceremonies to mark the end of botany. A discipline that had flourished in our universities for centuries - the first Oxford professor of botany, Robert Morison, was awarded his chair in 1669 - slipped away quietly into oblivion in 2013, with the graduation of the last students on the last undergraduate botany course, at Bristol. You can't do a botany degree in Britain any more. A once familiar element of life has simply disappeared, quite unremarked upon. Like the disappearance of hitchhiking, you might say.

Related: One in five of world's plant species at risk of extinction