Kew: A year at Kew: Places: Kew Gardens: Entrance Zone


	• Main Gate • Orangery • Colour Spectrum • White Peaks • Climbers and creepers • Lilac Garden • Broad Walk • Ice House & Winter Garden • Secluded Garden

Entrance Zone

Around a third of all Kew's million or so visitors come in through the Main Gate on Kew Green. It is one of the most historic areas, since it is where the original Botanic Garden founded by Princess Augusta was first established.

Today, the area is relatively mixed, mainly open lawns interspersed with trees and plantings. It is crossed by a number of formal pathways, often with avenue plantings, including Nesfield and Burton's Broad Walk and Little Broad Walk.

From the Main Gate, visitors pass the Nash Conservatory on the right, brought in from Buckingham Palace by King William IV, to reach the Orangery, itself one of Kew's earliest buildings and now a popular and very elegant café-restaurant.

In contrast, White Peaks is a striking modern building, combining an exhibition space with a refreshment area and shop. Next door, Climbers and creepers, opened in June 2004, proves Kew's determination to make serious botany great fun for children with Britain's first interactive botanical play zone.

The Ice House tells how laborious it once was to preserve food and enjoy cold drinks in summer. Today on grey days at the turn of the year, the Winter Garden around it pleases the eye with colourful shrubs and fills the air with scent. Nearby, the splendidly gnarled Pagoda Tree is one of Kew's oldest specimens, while on the Mound, there is a plaque denoting the site of the World Environment Day Time Capsule, buried in 1994.

Kew's beautiful Lilac Garden had an old music hall song written about it by Alfred Noyes, who exhorted us to 'Come down to Kew in Lilac Time'. The Secluded Garden was designed to please all the senses and appeals not only with colourful and perfumed plantings, but also rippling water and rustling leaves.