The Gardens' stand at the Bloom festival won a gold medal on Friday. The stand, entitled Cherishing Biodiversity, featured a wide array of endangered plants from home and abroad.

The National Botanic Gardens plays a key role in biodiversity conservation in Ireland and worldwide.

• Conserving over 400 threatened plant species in its collections.

• Raising public awareness and concern for plants worldwide.

• Building new plant conservation programmes with partners in countries such as Belize, Brazil, Chile, China and Russia.

• Developing an Irish Threatened Plants Programme to conserve the most critically endangered native Irish plants.

• Bringing together organisations and institutions from around the world at Glasnevin to plan urgent conservation action.