POWO (Kew Plants)

live Utility

POWO (Plants of the World Online, by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) MCP.

2 tools
0ms auth
free tier 50 calls/day

Tools

search_plants

Search POWO (Plants of the World Online, by Kew) — the authoritative global plant taxonomy database — for accepted plant names and synonyms by scientific or common name. Returns matching taxa with the

No parameters required.

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get_taxon

Fetch a full POWO (Plants of the World Online, by Kew) taxon record by its fqId (e.g. "urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:304293-2", obtained from search_plants). Returns the taxon's classification, family/genus

No parameters required.

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Test with curl

The gateway speaks JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP POST. You can test any pack directly from the terminal.

List available tools
bash 
curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/powo/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}'
Call a tool
bash 
curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/powo/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"search_plants","arguments":{}}}'

Use with the SDK

Install @pipeworx/sdk to call tools from any TypeScript/Node project.

TypeScript 
import { Pipeworx } from '@pipeworx/sdk';
const px = new Pipeworx();
const result = await px.call("search_plants", {});
ask_pipeworx 
// Or ask in plain English:
const answer = await px.ask("powo (plants of the world online, by the royal botanic gardens, kew) mcp");