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.