Recap: Kew's £3m gallery to showcase botanic art,Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

The world's first gallery dedicated to botanical art opens at Kew Gardens today.

Costing £3 million, it will allow the public to see for the first time the gems in the Royal Botanic Gardens's vast holding of more than 200,000 prints, drawings and paintings dating back to 1700.

Many are horticultural illustrations made during the great scientific expeditions to little-known parts of the world by European explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

"The primary reason they have been collected is for scientific research but many of them are very beautiful in their own right," said Chris Mills, the head of library, art and archives at Kew.

Rare works include botanical illustrations by Ferdinand and Franz Bauer, Austrian brothers who were persuaded to come to England in the 18th century by the botanist Sir Joseph Banks.

While one brother joined the first circumnavigation of Australia, from 1801 to 1805, the other spent 40 years making exquisite detailed drawings of the flora of this country.

The new gallery is named after Dr Shirley Sherwood, the editor-in-chief of the Orient-Express magazine and vice-chairman of the Royal Horticultural Society, whose large collection of post-1990 botanical art will also be displayed there.

Kew, which is in south-west London, says its art collection may become of increasing importance because of predictions that one quarter of the world's species of flowering plants are threatened with extinction over the next 50 years.

Next year the Royal Botanic Gardens plans to build a reading room to allow the public access to Kew's 300,000 books.