The RHS will use AI to help build a knowledge bank of cultivated plants for specific uses, such as pollination, pollution capture and water management, as it launches a new five year programme of work to commence in 2025.
Plants for Purpose will see the charity work in collaboration with the University of Nottingham to develop a deep learning tool that will identify characteristics among the more than 400,000 different plant cultivars found in the UK that RHS and wider industry research has shown to be beneficial.
For example, RHS research has previously revealed that rough surfaced leaves are most adept at capturing particulate pollution. Machine learning techniques that reliably quantify texture, can be used to identify specimens from the RHS herbarium - a vast collection of dried plant specimens - with hairs and scales.
These plant trait matches will be cross checked by botanists and horticultural scientists and definitive guides will be published over the course of the next five years.
The knowledge bank will also include plants for biodiversity, health and wellbeing, thermal regulation, and carbon capture, helping to grow the pool of plants used by gardeners and mitigating the effects of the biodiversity crisis, climate change and urbanisation.
Alistair Griffiths, Director of Science at the RHS, said: "What we plant today needs to benefit us tomorrow so coupling RHS science with the University of Nottingham's technology to identify the winning traits of 400,000 potential garden plants could see a revolution in what we find in gardens, new developments and town and city landscaping."
Dr Michael Pound, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, said: “It's tremendously exciting to be part of a project that will deliver real impact for UK biodiversity. Deep learning excels when we have lots of data, and this is exactly what the RHS herbarium offers. The trained networks will study hundreds of thousands of images to draw out the key features that distinguish plants. These can then be embedded into tools that allow RHS scientists to identify potentially important varieties in seconds rather than months.”
The RHS has also announced the first show garden to be managed using AI at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show next summer. The charity is already experimenting with the technology via its ChatBotanist tool, which is available to members and RHS Grow app users with the intention of freeing up advisors to conduct research that will inform planting choices and management techniques in UK gardens.
Plants for Purpose is part funded by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.
