A MONTH IN THE LIFE OF…

Elisa Biondi organises the annual orchid festival at Kew Gardens, creating a riot of colour in the depths of winter

a horticulturalist at

Kew Gardens

February at Kew is all about orchids. I’m the manager of the Princess of Wales Conservatory, a 4,000-square-metre glasshouse, where we hold our orchid festival. Each year, we create displays inspired by a country. This year it’s Costa Rica. There will be turtles, jaguars and monkeys made from up to 7,000 plants.

Working at Kew is like being a kid in a candy store. It blew my mind when I joined in 2009. I studied agronomy at university in Italy – where I’m from – and came to Kew for an internship. I fell in love with England and met my husband, Scott, who manages the display houses here.

My first job every day is to water the plants. It would take a day for a single person to do it, so me and my team of six or seven each have a zone. We also check the temperature is correct (about 20°C) before we open to the public.

We would usually welcome 150,000 visitors. That number may be lower this year, but it’s always rewarding to see people enjoying our hard work. A Thai princess visited in 2018, when our theme was Thailand. She was really knowledgeable about orchids.

Our volunteer, Henck Röling, creates the animals. He starred in the Netflix show The Big Flower Fight and is amazingly quick. Six volunteers help with the build, beginning in January. Alex Moore, a metalworker, creates huge steel frames and we use dry materials like bark to create the animal structures before the orchids arrive.

The plants come from the Netherlands. They turn up a month before the event in temperature-controlled lorries and in individual pots. We use up to 300 orchids for an animal or archway.

Orchid hybrids have long flowering periods, while natural species are very diverse. Some can be as big as your hand, while others are as tiny as your fingernail. You find them on every continent, but are most common in the tropics. Costa Rica covers 0.03 per cent of the planet but is home to five per cent of the world’s biodiversity.

We have two orchid zones year-round: one for tropical orchids and one for temperate orchids from mountainous regions such as the Andes. My favourites are Masdevallia, which were cultivated by the Aztecs. This year, we’re hoping to add Costa Rican blooms from the Lankester Botanic Gardens. Tired orchids from the festival are mulched for the garden; the rest are sold to staff and volunteers. I have lots of old display orchids in my house.

We can see the glasshouse from our upstairs window at home – Scott and I live on site. Day or night, if there’s a problem with the climate control in the glasshouse, one of us will be on hand. We have a small garden but can visit the gardens whenever we want.

Kew is home to some of the world’s most endangered plants. This is more vital now than ever, as 40 per cent of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction*. Many of the plants here – such as Nymphaea thermarum, the world’s smallest waterlily – are extinct in the wild. Their home in Rwanda has been destroyed, but we propagate rare plants like these so that one day we can put them back where they belong.