To start off you will need to know the full botanical name of your plant; if you are not sure you can ask at your local
Plant Heritage Group meeting, take to a local nursery, or ask the
RHS if you are a member. If it is a plant for which there is a
National Plant Collection, you may be able to ask the advice of the Collection Holder.
Once you know the name, you can check it online, or in a paper copy of the
RHS Plant Finder – as a rough indication, the fewer nurseries that are stocking your plant, the more likely it is to be rare enough to register within the Plant Guardian scheme. If it has more than five entries it is unlikely to be Threatened, if it has just one there is a good chance it is. If you are not sure, register it anyway, we check all the plants that you input!
When you
register the plant online, we will check it for you, and let you know if it qualifies or not. We use the methods used in the
Threatened Plants Project to assess cultivars and a combination of the TPP methods and the
IUCN Red list for species.
