This year, Seychelles' plants won a prestigious prize at the Chelsea Flower show, which is organised every spring in the UK by the Royal Horticultural Society to celebrate horticultural excellence.

The show is televised and covers everything from introducing new plants to elaborately constructed show gardens. The week-long show attracts thousands of visitors every year and therefore, as one might expect, every Chelsea Flower Show has a first aid tent for people.

This year however, there was also the first ever first aid stand for plants.

Featuring plants in bandages, plant x-rays and trained staff on hand the ‘Species Recovery Unit’ was actually in the Life Long Learning section of the show.

The exhibit was designed to showcase the conservation work carried out by the Seychelles Ministry of the Environment in collaboration with the Eden Project and funded by the UK Darwin Initiative.

Six Seychelles endemic plant species were displayed including the rare Jellyfish Tree, Medusagyne oppositifolia. Visitors were genuinely fascinated by their uniqueness, for some it was the first time they had seen plants from a tropical island, for others it brought back fond memories of holiday visits to the Vallée de Mai. Everyone who visited the stand left with a sense of appreciation for Seychelles' unique ecological heritage and an admiration for the efforts that Seychelles is employing to preserve our comer of the global biodiversity.

The visitors were not the only ones who were impressed. The judges awarded a prestigious Silver-Gilt medal to the Species Recovery Unit for the inspiring and engaging way it presented the importance of conservation work on small islands to the British public.

The Seychelles plants featured were the Curculigo sechellensis (Koko Maron), Pandanus multispicatus (Vakwa-d-Montanny), Nepenthess pervillei (pitcher plant),

Medusagyne oppositifolia (Bwa Mediz) Impatiens gordonii (Belsamin Sovaz) and

Lodoicea maldivica (Koko-d-Mer).

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