The members of Work packages (WPs) 1 and 2 were invited to a workshop at Kew (UK) in September 2009 to discuss the criteria to be used to select plants, to allocate tasks among members and to discuss future meetings. All these tasks were addressed during the phase I meeting. A preliminary list of plants has been distributed to members of the group and also forwarded to other WPs. It was agreed that the aim of the WP is to collate data about a number of species to enable us to identify gaps of information needed for TCM plants to meet the registration requirements within Europe and that the number of priority species of the WP should be low and thus might reflect a simple formulation that contains only a few species. Once the species are agreed, members will provide other groups with all relevant names for the selected species so that these can be used in database search. The group also agreed the structure of a simple database and requested whether they might be able to have Wikipedia style functionality for the WP1 member space to download relevant papers and data. Members agreed to try and meet face to face in 2010 as a phase II meeting and communicate virtually in between.