Royal Botanic Gardens

About Royal Botanic Gardens

Botanical garden and world's largest collection of living plants in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames

Kew Gardens, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, is a botanic garden in south-west London formally founded in 1759 that houses "the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world"; it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003 and is one of London's top tourist attractions. Traceable to the exotic garden formed by Henry, Lord Capell at Kew Park, the site now covers 132 hectares (330 acres) of gardens and botanical glasshouses on the Thames between Richmond and Kew, with four Grade I and 36 Grade II listed structures in an internationally significant landscape; it is Grade I listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens and has had its own police force, Kew Constabulary, since 1845. Its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which also manages Wakehurst in Sussex and is an internationally important research and education institution with over 1,100 staff; the herbarium, one of the largest in the world, holds more than 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens, the library over 750,000 volumes and the illustrations collection more than 175,000 prints and drawings. Since its creation as a royal estate in 1759 Kew has made a significant and uninterrupted contribution to the study of plant diversity and economic botany, and its features illustrate significant periods of garden and landscape art from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Highlights include the Victorian Palm House glasshouse, the Temperate House, reopened in May 2018 and the largest surviving Victorian glass structure in the world, the Princess of Wales Conservatory of tropical plants, the Treetop Walkway, the Great Pagoda, little Kew Palace, the bonsai and orchid collections and the Japanese and rock gardens.

Where:

London, United Kingdom