A piece of paradise

I find it impossible to be dispassionate about the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. For me, it is not just an area of part-designed, part-semi-natural landscape of 300 acres in south-west London, as well as a world-renowned centre of research and learning in botany and horticulture. Kew is where I learned the science and craft of gardening, and where I first started to write about them. I am prouder of being a ‘Kewite’ than pretty well anything else, so I cannot easily view Kew’s semiquincentennial this year with Olympian detachment.

The story of Kew is well-known*. Put shortly, a royal playground morphed into a repository for unusual plants and then became an important reception for plants found by plant hunters searching for economically useful, or decoratively attractive, plants across the globe and thereafter a pre-eminent place to study those plants, both dead and alive. Kew was blessed with far-sighted royal patrons, who could command the most interesting architects and designers of the day and then, as a result of a succession of remarkable, energetic directors, it developed into one of the pre-eminent botanical gardens in the world, as well as a pleasure-ground for Londoners.

For most of the 20th century, Kew was funded and run by the Ministry of Agriculture. Visitors were tolerated, but not encouraged, except by the penny entrance fee. In 1984, Kew became a non-governmental, grant-aided institution, under a Board of Trustees, and visitors had to help pay for upkeep, so Kew began more actively to engage with them. All the remarkable glasshouses are now in spanking nick, the Herbarium and Jodrell Laboratory have been recently enlarged, and the quality of the new garden structures and buildings — the Shirley Sherwood Gallery for botanical art, and the beautifully sinuous Sackler Bridge across the Lake, in particular — defends Kew from accusations of theme-parkery, while ensuring a really enjoyable ‘destination’.