Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

I visited Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew by train from Brighton to London Victoria and from London Victoria station to Kew Gardens by London Underground District (Green line) train. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is still known for its collections of living and preserved plants and botanical information. It is an encyclopaedia of knowledge about the plant kingdom.

                                          Underground train- District (Green line)

                                                          Victoria Gate of Kew

                                                            Kew Explorer

Entry fee to the gardens is £ 13.50. The Royal Botanic Gardens is spread over 132 ha. Or 326 acres of land. I took the Kew Explorer. This is a hop-on/hop-off land train which operates within the garden area for every hour. The Kew Explorer takes around the garden which is forty minute tour with commentary and I felt that this is the best way to have information about Kew garden. The Kew Explorer travel fee is £ 2.00 and this is in addition to the entrance fees.

The top four most popular attractions at Kew are- Palm House, Temperate House, Xstrata Treetop Walkway and Princess of Wales Conservatory.

                                                                 Palm House

1. Palm House:  I experienced a tropical rainforest environment inside this. This is Kew's most iconic building and designed to accommodate the exotic palms and now this has formed a miniature indoor tropical rainforest. The most diverse collections of palms found in a glasshouse are the peach palm (Bactris gasipaes), babassu (Attalea speciosa), queen palm (Syagrus romanzoffiana) and the coconut palm (Cocos nucifera).
Some of the palms housed here are threatened in the wild. Here we find a number of rattans (climbing palms) and also the coco-de-mer or double coconut (Lodoicea maldivica) with its seed – the largest in the world.

 Oldest pot plant in the world (Encephalartos altensteinii) has lived through Kew's entire history as a Botanical Garden! This was one of the first plants to be moved into the Palm House in 1848.

2. Temperate House: The is home to possibly the world’s tallest glasshouse plants like, a Chilean wine palm (Jubaea chilensis), Livistona chinensis and Chamaeropshumilis.
In the South Wing and Octagon of the glass house are home to African plants, the main rectangular hall hosts sub-tropical trees and palms, while the North Wing and Octagon contain temperate plants from Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific. A boiler in the nearby Stable Yard helps to keep the temperature to a minimum 10°C all year round.

3. Xstrata Treetop Walkway: This is 18-metres high and 200-metres walkway provides spectacular bird's-eye view of Kew. It is ssupported by steel columns that blend with the natural environment; it provides opportunities for inspecting birds, insects, lichen and fungi at close.

                                                         Xstrata Treetop Walkway

4. Princess of Wales Conservatory:

It is the most complex conservatory at Kew, containing ten computer-controlled climatic zones under one roof. The two main climate zones are the ‘dry tropics’, representing the world’s warm, arid areas, and the ‘wet tropics’, housing moisture loving plants from ecosystems such as rainforests and mangrove swamps. The eight remaining microclimates include a seasonally dry zone containing desert and savanna plants. A huge variety of ferns, orchids, cacti and carnivorous plants from Asia are grown here.

                                                  Princess of Wales Conservatory

                                                                  Desert flora

                                                                   Orchids

 Cacao-the tastiest plant in the world? Theobroma cacao known for products-chocolate

                                                  Carnivorous plants- Sarracenia

                                                  Carnivorous plants- Dionaea

                                                                 Marine flora

                                                                 Sea horse

                                                                Marine algae

Trees in Kew Garden:

Trees are defoliated due to season.

 Maiden hair tree-Ginkgo biloba,one of the oldest trees 200 million years

This is Japanese pagoda tree one of Kew's 'Old Lions', this heritage tree was planted around 1760 and is one of the few remaining trees from the original nine acre botanic garden. Styphnolobium japonicum is an ornamental tree known for its beautiful hanging inflorescences.

                                                             Japanese Pagoda
The ten-storey octagonal structure is 163 ft high (nearly 50 m) and has 253 steps to climb the top.