This morning we are going to take advantage of the forecasted sunnier day (clouds with sunshine and NO rain) and head off to the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. However, before we head out to the gardens we are going to do a dry run to locate and time our destination for tomorrow – the Victoria Coach Station – where we will be taking a tour to Bath and Stonehenge. So we head out the door, set the timer and head off to find the station.
First thing we discovered was the metro train we planned to take from Paddington is closed today. So on-the-fly we have to figure out a re-route. This meant that instead of just one metro we now needed to take two. As it turned out we figured that this actually was a quicker route since it has fewer stops even with a change required. Ok, finding the station itself from the metro was a bit of chore too, but once we located it we are glad we did the dry run. The total time from hotel to station (even with our hunting and re-routing) was 1 hour and 15 minutes. Now we can figure out what time to leave the hotel tomorrow and we know where we are going. All is good.
We then headed out to Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, usually referred to simply as Kew Gardens and often shortened to "Kew", are 121 hectares of gardens and botanical glasshouses. The Royal Botanic Gardens, a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is an internationally important botanical research and education institution with 700 staff and an income of £56 million for the year ended 31 March 2008, as well as a visitor attraction receiving almost two million visits in that year. Created in 1759, the gardens celebrated their 250th anniversary in 2009.
The Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is responsible for the world's largest collection of living plants. The living collections include more than 30,000 different kinds of plants, while the herbarium, which is one of the largest in the world, has over seven million preserved plant specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants.
Kew Gardens originated in the exotic garden at Kew Park formed by Lord Capel John of Tewkesbury. It was enlarged and extended by Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales. One of structures build for Augusta is the lofty Chinese pagoda built in 1761 still remains. George III enriched the gardens, aided by William Aiton and Sir Joseph Banks. The "Dutch House" adjoining was purchased by George III in 1781 as a nursery for the royal children. It is a plain brick structure now known as Kew Palace and is an exhibit of its own.
The collections grew somewhat haphazardly until the appointment of the first collector, Francis Masson, in 1771. In 1840 the gardens were adopted as a national botanical garden. The Palm House was built by architect Decimus Burton and iron-maker Richard Turner between 1844 and 1848, and was the first large-scale structural use of wrought iron. The structure's panes of glass are all hand-blown. The Temperate House, which is twice as large as the Palm House, followed later in the 19th century. It is now the largest Victorian glasshouse in existence. In March 2006, the Davies Alpine House opened the third version of an alpine house since 1887. Built for the Japan-British Exhibition (1910) and moved to Kew in 1911, the Chokushi-Mon is a four-fifths scale replica of the karamon (gateway) of the Nishi Hongan-ji temple in Kyoto.
Kew Palace is the smallest of the British royal palaces. It was built around 1631 and was later purchased by George III. The construction method is known as Flemish bond and involves laying the bricks with long and short sides alternating. This and the gabled front tend to give the construction a definite Dutch appearance. To the rear of the building is the "Queen's Garden" which includes a collection of plants believed to have medicinal qualities. Only plants that were extant in England by the 17th century are grown in the garden.
Following the Japan 2001 festival, Kew acquired a Japanese wooden house called a minka. The Marianne North Gallery was built in the 1880s to house the paintings of Marianne North. The gallery originally opened in 1882 and is the only permanent exhibition dedicated solely to the work of one woman in Great Britain. Near the Palm House is a building known as "Museum No. 1" (even though it is the only museum on the site). In the South East corner of Kew Gardens stands the Great Pagoda (by Sir William Chambers), erected in 1762, from a design in imitation of the Chinese Ta. The lowest of the ten octagonal storeys is 49 feet (15 m) in diameter. From the base to the highest point is 163 feet (50 m).
Kew's third major conservatory, the Princess of Wales Conservatory, was opened in 1987 by Diana, Princess of Wales in commemoration of her predecessor Augusta's associations with Kew. The conservatory houses ten computer-controlled micro-climatic zones, with the bulk of the greenhouse volume composed of Dry Tropics and Wet Tropics plants. Significant numbers of orchids, water lilies, cacti, lithops, carnivorous plants and bromeliads are housed in the various zones. The cactus collection also extends outside the conservatory where some hardier species can be found.
The Temperate House greenhouse has twice the floor area of the Palm House and is the world's largest surviving Victorian glass structure. It contains plants and trees from all the temperate regions of the world. It was commissioned in 1859. A treetop walkway opened on 24 May 2008. This walkway is 18 metres (59 ft) high and 200 metres (660 ft) long and takes visitors into the tree canopy of a woodland glade.
We spent most of the day walking through the parkland exploring and admiring the plants. As you can see by the pictures I had a tough time cutting down the number of pictures to include.
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