Welcome to the Blooming Numbers digital tour
Blooming Numbers was our interactive exhibit at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025, showcasing cutting-edge plant science research with a focus on the flower.
If you couldn’t join us at Chelsea, we’re bringing the experience to you. Scroll down to explore the posters, videos, and interactive content that made up the exhibit—and discover how a quantitative approach, combining experiments with computational modelling, is helping scientists decode plants.
Starting with the flower
Flowers are more than just beautiful. Their vibrant colours, intricate shapes, and striking patterns have evolved over millions of years—not for us, but to attract pollinators, protect delicate pollen, and in some cases to ensure seeds find their way into the world.
From a flower’s first moments as a single cell to its final bloom, our Blooming Numbers exhibit traced the fascinating journey of floral development.
The Pollinator Patch
Oakington Garden Centre, a beloved family-run nursery based in the village of Oakington on the outskirts of Cambridge, created a mini garden to champion pollinators for the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge: Blooming Numbers exhibit at the RHS Flower Show 2025. The garden was not only beautful, it was designed to illustrate how even a tiny space can provide pollinators with food, shelter and nesting resources throughout the year - and most importantly - a safe source of water.
The Pollinator Patch Plant List
Thank you to our Partners and Sponsors
The Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge: Blooming Numbers exhibit was made possible thanks to our partnership with Oakington Garden Centre, Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and Darwin Nurseries.
We are incredibly grateful for generous support of The Gatsby Charitable Foundation core funding, and sponsorship of our exhibit from Leica Microsystems and Strulch.
Partners
Sponsors
Blooming Numbers
How a quantitative approach helps us to understand plants
Our mission at the Sainsbury Laboratory is to advance our understanding of how plants develop, change, and respond to the environment.
To do this we:
1. Research across scales:
We investigate the fundamental processes that regulate plant development across multiple scales, from molecular biology to cells, mechanics, individual plants, populations and ecosystems.
2. Take an interdisciplinary approach:
We bring together specialists and techniques from diverse fields with mechanics, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, imaging, computational modelling, evolution, and mathematics.
3. Use new technologies:
We work with a broad range of species, use and develop cutting-edge tools, including high-resolution microscopy, advanced modelling, and specialised genetic reporters.
*Click on the below image of the poster to open a PDF version
How shared genes lead to a world of flowers
Even though fowers like grasses, roses, and orchids look completely different, they often use the same core genetic instructions.
At this science station visitors were invited to dissect a diversity of different flowers and examine under a stereo microscope to explore the different flower structures.
*Click on the below poster image to open a PDF version
Thank you
Thank you to Myrtle Mee Flowers owner Lydia Glenday who travelled from Bath to design our floral display with flowers she specially selected to show a range of flower types and Phoam Lab's Duncan McCabe who kindly allowed us to sample a new and soon-to-be launched in the UK compostable floral foam made from maize that fully biodegrades in 25 days. The compostable foam removed any risk of vases of water toppling onto our precious microscopes during the week. And Duncan went above and beyond by replenishing our flowers at 7am every morning during the entire RHS Chelseas Flower Show week.
Some of the flower samples provided by nurseries and specialist growers that were imaged using a scanning electron microscope at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025. From top left, daisy capitulum showing individual disc florets arranged in Fibonacci spiral, Dendrobium orchid seeds, edge of protea flower, Rosa glauca stigma and anthers, Stipa gigantea flower, Stipa gigantea awn fluff, sand grass cross-section, cells on border between red-white colour on Dianthus petal.
How scanning electron microscopes reveal a hidden plant world
Unlike the microscope that you might have used in high school biology, a scanning electron microscope (SEM) uses a beam of electrons instead of light to “see” an image.
Scanning electron microscopes (SEM) let us observe nanoscale structures as small as one millionth of a millimetre. Both conventional and cryo-SEM (a technique where samples are rapidly frozen to preserve their natural hydrated state) are often coated with metals like gold, palladium, platinum, or iridium to improve image quality.
*Click on the below poster image to open a PDF version
Thank you
Thank you to the Sainsbury Laboratory Microscopy Facilities team, Raymond Wightman, Gareth Evans and Martin Lenz who supported us taking our precious microscopes to Chelsea and helped with training and preparing the microscopes for transport.
How evolution modifies floral patterns to attract pollinators
At the Sainsbury Laboratory we are identifying genes that plants use to produce these patterns.
To understand how petal patterns develop, evolve and function, we developed a small species of Hibiscus as a new experimental model and we combine genetics and biochemistry approaches with microscopy techniques, modelling and behavioural experiments with bumblebees.
Pollinators and fowering plants evolved together, creating the multitude of petal patterns we see today.
Plants use both colour and cell shape patterns to attract pollinators.
*Click on the below poster image to open a PDF version
How we are tackling the grand challenge of re-engineering the flower
How does a group of identical cells transform into a fower?
Symmetry breaking is the process in which identical cells take on distinct roles, forming structures like sepals, petals, stamens and carpels in flowers.
To understand how symmetry breaking happens we aim to build a 3D virtual flower over time by imaging and simulating growth and development. We will use experiments to test our virtual model.
*Click on the below poster image to open a PDF version
How plants hedge their bets for survival
Imagine planting two identical seeds in the same pot with the same soil and sunlight. You’d expect them to germinate at the same time and grow the same way—but sometimes
one germinates sooner, grows taller or blooms faster. That’s not because the seed is “better” or the conditions were truly different—it’s because of tiny random differences in gene expression. We call this stochasticity.
*Click on the below poster image to open a PDF version
How biomechanics drives plant growth, structure and movement
Understanding mechanical properties
Biomechanics refers to the study of the mechanical principles of living organisms, particularly their movement and structure. We use a combination of novel biophysical tools, genetic manipulation and mathematical modelling to investigate how plant development (cell division and cell expansion) is controlled.
*Click on the below poster image to open a PDF version
How soil fungi and bacteria help feed plants
Turbocharging plants
To grow and flower, plants get nutrients from microbes. These microbes live inside their roots. Plant microbe friendships date back hundreds of millions of years.
Communication across the membrane
Though these microbes live inside plant roots, they’re separated from the plant's cytoplasm by a membrane. Our research aims to understand how microbes and plants exchange nutrients and information across this interface.
*Click on the below poster image to open a PDF version
