Description
Kew Gardens is the botanic garden of south-west London: 132 hectares of lawns, lakes and Victorian glasshouses along the Thames, and a World Heritage Site. It holds, by its own account, the largest and most diverse botanical and fungal collections in the world.
It is a garden for a full day, with something under glass whatever the weather. The Palm House, built in the 1840s, is a curved cage of wrought iron and glass full of tropical palms, with a walkway at nine meters that puts you at the height of their crowns.
The Temperate House is twice the size, the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world, with rare plants from every temperate region. Climb to its viewing gallery. The Princess of Wales Conservatory adds ten climate zones, from desert to wet tropics, with orchids, cacti and carnivorous plants.
Outdoors, the Treetop Walkway runs 200 meters, 18 meters up among the branches; its steel supports were made to rust to a tree-like color. The Great Pagoda, 50 meters and ten storeys high, rises in the south-east corner of the gardens.
The Hive, a 17-meter lattice of aluminum in a wildflower meadow, is a multi-sensory experience about the life of bees. The Marianne North Gallery displays 832 botanical paintings by a woman who traveled alone around the world to paint plants, in a time when few women did.
The Great Pagoda was once adorned with eighty dragons. Legend says they were gold, and that George IV sold them to pay his debts. The truth is duller: they were wood painted gold, and they simply rotted away.
The gardens grew out of royal passions. In the 18th century Princess Augusta, widow of the Prince of Wales, enlarged an exotic garden here; William Chambers added follies, the pagoda among them, and George III enriched it with the help of Sir Joseph Banks.
In 1840 Kew became a national botanic garden. The Palm House, by the architect Decimus Burton and the ironmaker Richard Turner, uses a frame of wrought-iron arches. Its glass was originally tinted green with copper oxide to cut the heat.
Kew has had its own police force since 1845, and the Kew Constabulary still patrols the grounds.
It is a garden for a full day, with something under glass whatever the weather. The Palm House, built in the 1840s, is a curved cage of wrought iron and glass full of tropical palms, with a walkway at nine meters that puts you at the height of their crowns.
The Temperate House is twice the size, the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world, with rare plants from every temperate region. Climb to its viewing gallery. The Princess of Wales Conservatory adds ten climate zones, from desert to wet tropics, with orchids, cacti and carnivorous plants.
Outdoors, the Treetop Walkway runs 200 meters, 18 meters up among the branches; its steel supports were made to rust to a tree-like color. The Great Pagoda, 50 meters and ten storeys high, rises in the south-east corner of the gardens.
The Hive, a 17-meter lattice of aluminum in a wildflower meadow, is a multi-sensory experience about the life of bees. The Marianne North Gallery displays 832 botanical paintings by a woman who traveled alone around the world to paint plants, in a time when few women did.
The Great Pagoda was once adorned with eighty dragons. Legend says they were gold, and that George IV sold them to pay his debts. The truth is duller: they were wood painted gold, and they simply rotted away.
The gardens grew out of royal passions. In the 18th century Princess Augusta, widow of the Prince of Wales, enlarged an exotic garden here; William Chambers added follies, the pagoda among them, and George III enriched it with the help of Sir Joseph Banks.
In 1840 Kew became a national botanic garden. The Palm House, by the architect Decimus Burton and the ironmaker Richard Turner, uses a frame of wrought-iron arches. Its glass was originally tinted green with copper oxide to cut the heat.
Kew has had its own police force since 1845, and the Kew Constabulary still patrols the grounds.