Kew is a botanical garden of 326 acres beside the Thames in south-west London, and it is far more than a pleasant day out. It holds the largest collection of living plants in the world, a herbarium of seven million preserved specimens, and a research operation that underpins global plant conservation.
The glasshouses
- The Palm House — the great curved iron and glass structure of 1848, and the finest surviving Victorian glasshouse anywhere. It holds a tropical rainforest, and the humidity hits you at the door. Built by Decimus Burton and the ironfounder Richard Turner using shipbuilding techniques, because nobody had made anything like it before.
- The Temperate House — twice the size, and the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world, reopened in 2018 after a five-year restoration.
- The Princess of Wales Conservatory — ten climate zones under one roof, from desert to mangrove swamp, including carnivorous plants and giant waterlilies.
The science
Kew’s real work is research and conservation. Its scientists identify and name new plant and fungal species — around 200 a year — and its collections are the reference standard used worldwide.
The Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst in Sussex is the flagship project: seeds from tens of thousands of wild species, dried, frozen at -20°C and stored underground as an insurance policy against extinction. It holds over 2.4 billion seeds, with a particular focus on species from habitats under immediate threat.
The imperial history
Kew’s foundations are inseparable from empire, and the institution now says so openly. Its collectors gathered plants from across the world, and Kew was directly instrumental in moving economically valuable crops between colonies — rubber seedlings from Brazil to Malaya, cinchona from South America to India, breadfruit to the Caribbean.
These transfers made enormous sums and reshaped colonial economies, generally to the disadvantage of the countries the plants came from. Kew has undertaken a public reckoning with this history in recent years, which was not universally welcomed and was clearly overdue.
What else is there
- The Treetop Walkway — 18 metres up, among the crowns of the trees.
- The Great Pagoda — a ten-storey Chinese-style tower of 1762, restored with its eighty dragons replaced.
- Kew Palace — a small red-brick house where George III was confined during his illness.
- The Hive — a 17-metre aluminium lattice that hums and glows in response to live data from a real beehive.
- The Marianne North Gallery — 832 botanical paintings by a Victorian woman who travelled the world alone to make them, hung frame to frame across every wall.
Visiting
Allow a full day; the site is large and people consistently underestimate the walking. Kew Gardens station is on the District line and the Overground. Spring for the bluebells and blossom, autumn for the arboretum, and winter for the glasshouses, which is when they are at their most welcome.