The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

On the trail of royal quarrels, southern voyages, and the storied Gardens

In a bend in the river Thames between Kew and Richmond, a royal deer park became the site of a royal palace, king and courtiers arriving swiftly by river. In the 17th century, the Duke of Ormonde leased the lodge, built a summer house, and had walks cut through the woods. The numbers of birds made "a most delicious habitation.” Lovely while it lasted, the property was swept away from the Duke after the unsuccessful Jacobean Rebellion. The Prince and Princess of Wales, exiled from court by George I, who disliked his son, moved in.

The Princess, later Queen, Caroline, decided to landscape her estate. In 1719 she called a parliament of gardeners, invited suggestions, and selected two of the greatest British landscape designers, Charles Bridgeman and William Kent, to set about "helping Nature, not losing it in art".

She took the words from their mouths, as keeping nature natural is what they had proposed. At Richmond Lodge, as the estate was called, Bridgeman designed a free and informal landscape of woods and fields. He carved out Merlin’s Cave, established the Amphitheatre and Oval connected by the Duck Pond, and laid out a canal garden. Kent built a classical pavilion and a romantic folly. Large crowds strolled along the promenade, and Caroline enjoyed some rural idylls there before dying, deeply in debt, in 1737.

The Hanovers apparently maintained a family tradition of hostile relations. Just as George I had quarreled with the future George II and Caroline, and banished them from court, so George II and Caroline quarreled with their son and his wife, and banished them from court. Repeating history the Prince and Princess of Wales took refuge at Richmond. The Prince died in 1751, but not before he made changes to the gardens – redesigning gardens was apparently another family trait.

A year after the Prince died, Augusta decided to complete the gardens. It was soon rumoured that she was having an affair with John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, the tutor of her son, the future George III. Bute, however, had fallen in love with the garden, and he and Augusta made plans to establish a serious botanic garden, a garden which would “. . .contain all the plants known on Earth".

The dream of a botanical garden was realized in 1759, when the Physic or Exotic Garden was created. It is the direct ancestor of today's establishment, and “1759 is now accepted as the foundation of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.” Augusta had a quixotic spirit, and she hired William Chambers to build the legendary 10-storey red Chinese pagoda.

When George III came to the throne, he naturally decided the garden needed alterations, and hired Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who contributed to the garden’s design mainly by sweeping away previous contributions, and introducing sweeping vistas to the scene. Despite his best efforts, however, it is still possible to see Bridgeman and Kent's work in the Gardens and, of course, the Chinese pagoda.

Meanwhile, as the website of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew » points out, the Physics or Exotic garden covered an area of about 10 acres and was devoted to medicinal plantings. It continued to grow and flourish under Princess Augusta's patronage, but it was not until after her death in 1772 that Sir Joseph Banks began his involvement with the site and Kew developed international significance.

Joseph Banks was twenty-five when he joined Lt. (later Captain) Cook on HM Bark Endeavour, a ship designed to handle reef-strewn oceans and archipelagos. They rounded Cape Horn, and arrived in Tahiti in 1769 to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun as part of the Royal Society's scientific effort to establish planetary distances. By then Banks was already filling the ship with his South American plant specimens.

Once Tahiti had been reached, Cook opened his sealed orders, and learned they were to sail south, to search for the continent of Terra Australis. They reached New Zealand, and sailed along the east coast of Australia. Banks was ecstatic. They had found the southern continent and thousands of plants he had never seen before, and since the ship required a long layover for repairs, he had time to collect buckets of them.

Less than ten years later, when he was back in Britain, Banks would be dispatching explorers and botanists to all corners of the globe, and botanical specimens would pour into the Royal Botanic Gardens, which he now headed. The English Garden, Part 2, describes a few of those horticultural adventurers.

In the 1840s, William Jackson Hooker became director, and initiated the great metamorphosis and flowering of the Gardens. Hooker established the museum, the library, the crucial department of economic botany, and the glass palaces that are the Palm and Temperate Houses.

As a result of Hooker's work and those who followed him, the Gardens now contain the largest plant collection in the world. Research has led to the commercial cultivation of the banana, coffee, tea, the rubber tree, and medicinal drugs.

Wakehurst Place, West Sussex, location of a beautiful old house, gardens, and the Millennium Seed Bank

Recently, Kew established two out-stations to grow more plants. They are at the beautiful estate of Wakehurst Place in Sussex, and (jointly with the Forestry Commission) Bedgebury Pinetum in Kent, the latter specialising in growing conifers.

Kew does not contain "all the plants known on Earth," but it comes wonderfully close.

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