Royal Botanic Garden of Kew

by Michael Benincasa and Ilaria Palmieri 5BT

DISCOVER THE AMAZING GARDEN WITH US!

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew is one of the London's largest UNESCO World Heritage sites offering unique landscapes and iconic architecture from every stage of the Gardens' history.

The collection of living plants is the largest and most diverse in the world, growing out in the Gardens and inside the glasshouses.

There is a huge collection and variety of plants housed in various climates across the 300 acre site.

Kew contains a lot of type of plants.

The collection contains plants from tropical, temperate, arid and alpine climates, and are grown out in the Gardens and in controlled conditions within glasshouses and nurseries.

The most famous plants are:

Titan arum mimics the smell of rotting flesh to attract these pollinators.

The bat pitcher plant another species that captures animal poop. This plant has a special relationship with woolly bats. The pitcher has a prominent ridge which is perfect for the bats to cling to. It also has an enlarged opening which reflects the ultrasound calls of the bats

The Welwitschia mirabilis, grows in barren deserts along the Atlantic sea-belt of Namibia and Angola. They are the original leaves from when the plant was a seedling, which continue to grow and are never shed.

IN THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDEN ARE LOCATED:

The Temperate House enable you to connect more closely with nature, to discover a diverse variety of plants and explore the 250 year history of the Gardens.

Marianne North Gallery in this extraordinary gallery, you can see 833 of her paintings displayed in geographical order, which she hung after travelling around the world.

Palm House an iconic Victorian glasshouse, the rainforest climate inside supports a unique collection of tropical plants from some of the most threatened environments on Earth. The Princess of Wales Conservatory explore plants from ten different climate zones including cacti, orchids, carnivorous plants and the remarkable Titan arum, which produces one of the largest flowering structures and foulest outdoors in the plant kingdom. The Hive is a unique, multi-sensory experience designed to highlight the extraordinary life of bees. A feat of British engineering, it stands 17 metres tall, set in a wildflower meadow.

WHY IS IT INCLUDED IN THE UNESCO WHL?

CITERIA II: to exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning or landscape design;

Since the 18th century, the Botanic Gardens of Kew have been closely associated with scientific and economic exchanges established throughout the world in the field of botany, and this is reflected in the richness of its collections. The landscape and architectural features of the Gardens reflect considerable artistic influences both with regard to the European continent and to more distant regions;