The green planet
ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH HAS been boggling our minds with his recent BBC show about plants, and Kew is the place to keep exploring the wonderful, weird world of botany. It holds over eight million items – 60,000 living plants, plus preserved specimens and documents – in what is the ‘largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collection in the world’.
Established in 1759 by Princess Augusta, the gardens have been shaped by numerous notable landscape architects including ‘Capability’ Brown, and span a world of habitats from Alpine rock garden to Palm House to Japanese garden, arboretum to carnivorous plants to aquatic garden. You can even get into the canopy, 59 feet up on the Treetop Walkway.
Joseph Banks was the driving force that turned Kew from a pleasure garden to a centre of botanical research. He was on Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage (1768-71) and returned with over 1000 species never before seen in Europe; he later commissioned explorers to collect specimens from around the world. And some are extraordinary to see: a Madagascan palm that flowers once after 50 years and then dies, a corpse flower that lures insects with its putrid odour, and lily-pads six feet across.