Although assessed as a threatened species, the plants have some protection because they are located in a national park.
Among the other discoveries officially named this year were six new species of webcap toadstool mushrooms in the United Kingdom and a strange shrub encountered in southern Namibia in 2010.
Botanist Wessel Swanepoel could not place the shrub in any known genus and neither could anyone else, and so Swanepoel called Kew's molecular expert Felix Forest and his team for analysis.
Gastrodia agnicellus has been crowned the 'ugliest orchid in the world' (Image: Reuters)
The result was that it was not just a new species, but a new genus and a new family, called Tiganophyton karasense.