Rare Indian plant species featured at large Victorian glasshouse in UK

LONDON: A massive Victorian glasshouse in the sylvan Kew Gardens of west London is drawing crowds to the many rare, exotic and nearly-extinct plants from across the globe, including India.

Called Temperate House, the structure is big enough to house three Boeing 747s. It is home to an internationally important collection of temperate zone plants arranged region-wise from Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Americas and the Pacific Islands.

Greg Redwood, head of glasshouses at Kew Gardens, said: “There are over 1500 plants from across the globe’s temperate zones. In the Himalaya area, visitors can find a number of plants which occur in northeast India such as the Himalayan Mimosa, Mimosa himalayana, and Himalayan Bamboo, Dendrocalamus hamiltonii.”

Among the plants is the extremely rare South African cycad Encephalartos woodii, which is not found in the wild but in exclusive botanic gardens and private collections. It is dubbed ‘the loneliest plant in the world’ because only male plants remain, each is a clone of the specimen at Kew, which was collected in the middle of the 19th Century.

Another example is the Leucospermum conocarpodendron subsp. conocarpodendron grown from seeds over 200 years old, which are among the longest living seeds ever. The seeds were tucked away in a red leather-bound wallet from 1803 until 2005. There were 40 seed packets in the wallet, each labelled with species annotations; some mysterious, with one listing saying: ‘Seeds from a tree with crooked thorns’.