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Kew Magazine
Windows on the world
Built to house the thriving plant collections gathered by Victorian globetrotters, Kew’s Temperate House has since gained a life of its own. By day, its heavy wooden doors swing open to welcome horticulturists, tourists and schoolchildren keen to tour the world’s semi-hardy flora in an afternoon. Then at night, when the public retreats, its towering palms, filmy tree ferns and blooming rhododendrons provide an exotic backdrop for corporate dinners, private birthday parties and jazz concerts.
“From the beginning of June there’s something going on every
week,” says Dave Cooke, Temperate House manager. “One of
the most spectacular events was a dinner held by Siemens International
for 300 of its staff. They had trapezes hung from the top
of the house, with girls dressed as South
American birds and animals coming down
on ribbons. With the lights, smoke and
music, it was unbelievable.”
While corporate and media events bring a touch of glamour to the Temperate House, it’s the plants that are the real priority. Laid out largely according to designer Decimus Burton’s original geographic plan, the South Wing and Octagon are home to African plants, the main rectangular hall is filled with sub-tropical trees and palms, and the North Wing and Octagon hold temperate plants that hail from Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific.
Enter at the southern end, past the large wooden planters of orange-and-mauve bird of paradise flowers (Strelitzia reginae), and you’ll come to one of the world’s rarest plants, Encephalartos woodii. One of the four stems collected from a solitary plant discovered in Zululand in 1895 gave rise to the 3m-tall, fat-trunked specimen. “I’m keen on palms and cycads and I like looking after the old plants collected by long-departed plant hunters like George Forrest and Joseph Rock,” Dave admits.
It was to house Victorian botanists’ burgeoning
collections that the Temperate
House was commissioned in 1859. Major
work began in 1860 with £10,000 of government
funding but stopped in 1863 when
costs exceeded £29,000. Although only the
main section and two octagons were complete,
the glasshouse was officially opened
in May 1863. Its early inhabitants were New
Zealand plants from the Great Stove glasshouse
built a century before, some palms
from the overcrowded Palm House, and
tubs of “unhappy trees” from the Orangery.
Three decades later, work resumed to build the wings, which were completed by 1899. Today, the Grade I listed building covers some 4,880 sq m, and stands more than 19m at its tallest point. Imposing but elegant, it remains the largest surviving Victorian conservatory in the world.
Thanks to its vast size, the Temperate House has become the final resting place for several plants that have outgrown other parts of the Gardens. King of them all is the Chilean wine palm, Jubaea chilensis, which towers over unfurling ferns, fruit-laden orange trees and feather-fronded date palms in the main section. When it was last measured in 1985 it stood 17.6m high and is still slowly growing. It was raised some two decades before the Temperate House existed, in 1846, from a seed brought from Chile. The wine palm’s seeds are edible, the trunk’s sugary sap can be used as a sweetener or fermented into an alcoholic drink, and the fronds are ideal as a thatch for constructing shelters. However the tree’s versatility failed to impress Charles Darwin, when he visited Chile in the 1830s. “These palms are, for their family, very ugly trees,” he wrote in Voyage of the Beagle.
Trying to keep plants from around the world thriving under one roof is a constant challenge. The temperature was originally controlled using boilers built beneath the octagons, but today more modern technology has been installed. Dave keeps the house at a constant temperature of at least 8°C, relying on the sun to further warm the blossoming heathers of South Africa’s fynbos habitat in the South Octagon. The humidity is kept relatively low, and plants are watered using a sprinkler system that draws water from huge tanks stored beneath the terrace on which the house stands. With Kew promoting sustainable horticulture, all compost is peat-free, fertilisers are organic and the inevitable bugs are kept at bay using natural biological controls. In the staff quarters beneath the South Octagon, a poster displaying aphids, leafhoppers, mould and mites warns: know ’em before you kill ’em.
There’s also a kitchen here (where once a year Dave cooks up Christmas dinner for his team) and a cluttered office. In the quiet of the early morning, before the coaches unleash crocodiles of tourists and children into the Gardens, Dave sits at his desk and uses a crowded wall calendar to work out what needs doing when and by whom. Long ago, ten full-time staff kept the Temperate House’s leafy charges fed, watered and bug-free, but over the years the core team has dwindled to Dave, his right-hand man Andrew Luke, and a handful of horticultural students, interns and volunteers. With so much work and so few hands, everyone must use their initiative and pull their weight. “I can be called out 24 hours a day,” explains Dave, who lives on site and arrives at work at 7.30am by bicycle. “Glasshouses have to be manned 365 days a year.”
In addition to members of the public,
visitors to the Temperate House include
botanists from all over the world bent on
studying a particular plant; groups of
schoolchildren armed with worksheets;
and art students hunkered down among
the leaves attempting to capture the plants’
likenesses on paper. There’s also a regular
gentleman caller from south London who
draws cycads – lots of them.
The current exhibition of glass sculptures
by Dale Chihuly means Dave and his
team are busier than ever when I visit one
overcast morning. As part of Kew’s work to
help monitor plants arriving in the UK,
Dave has disappeared to inspect a dubious
consignment of cycads that HM Customs
has seized, Andrew’s busy planting felicias
and osteospermums, and a dozen or more
workmen are opening a stack of huge cardboard
boxes and carefully removing the
giant, coloured glass balls they contain.
When Dave appears, he’s sporting a somewhat anxious expression behind his round gold-rimmed glasses. “Right now I’m supposed to be being interviewed by the BBC, digging a hole in Bed 16 and talking to you,” he frets. Then, as a small shrub with oblong leaves catches his eye, he barks, “Who’s planted that bitter leaf in the wrong place?”
As well as maintaining the existing plants,
Dave is constantly introducing new ones.
Plantings have to be planned several years in
advance so the nursery can source seeds and
grow plants large enough to make a good
display. This year, alternating red and white
hippeastrums line the main east-west walkway,
while elegant tangerine angel’s trumpets
(Brugmansia) bloom in a collection of new
terracotta pots designed especially for Kew.
Next year Bed 16, which is currently home
to various citrus plants and an explosion of
sculptor Dale Chihuly’s gold and crimson
glass spirals, will be replanted. “We’ve certainly
introduced a more floral theme of
late,” says Dave, who’s managed the Temperate
House for six years. “Green is good, but
the public likes a bit of colour.”
In the past, visitors have rather overlooked the Temperate House, most of them making a beeline for the better-known Palm House. However, this year the Temperate House is the focal point of the Gardens of Glass exhibition and this, together with Dave’s lively appearances in the BBC documentary A Year at Kew, has made visitors more aware of its existence. “It’s been unfavourably compared with the Palm House, which I think is unfair,” says Kew’s curator Nigel Taylor. “It’s a very grand structure indeed and I would say that somewhere in the region of 800,000 people will pass through it this year.” So 150 years after the Temperate House first put down roots at Kew, this great unsung glasshouse is finally getting the attention it deserves.
pdf version of Windows on the world (692 KB)