South Africa Landscape - Kew at the British Museum

Thu 29 April - Sun 10 October 2010

Kew and the British Museum have brought a small corner of South Africa to the heart of London. Our South Africa Landscape highlights the rich diversity of plant life from South Africa’s Cape region – an internationally renowned biodiversity hotspot.

Kew's South Africa Landscape at the British Museum

Visit information

Admission: Free
Dates: 29 April - 10 October 2010
Location: West Lawn, Museum forecourt, British Museum, London
Map: How to get there

About the Landscape

Kew's South Africa Landscape at the British Museum celebrates the two institutions’ shared vision to strengthen cultural understanding and support biodiversity conservation across the world. Our Landscape makes connections between plants, people and objects on display in the Museum’s African galleries.

South Africa Landscape features African lily (Agapanthus africanus), fynbos heather, daisies such as the blue marguerite (Felicia amelloides) and the 'Star of the Veldt' (Osteospermum hyoseroides), the South African geranium (Pelargonium sidoides) and the Lesotho red hot poker (Kniphofia caulescens), with its bright orange rocket-shaped flowers.

Visitors can walk through the Landscape and get a feeling of the desert and experience tumbled rocks and scree and sand, interspersed with strangely shaped quiver trees (Aloe dichotoma), swathes of spectacular plant colour and an understorey of desert annual and perennial plants.

Reproductions of famous examples of rock art which depict men and animals from well-documented sites in South Africa are incised on to a number of rocks in the Landscape. Find out more at the South Africa Landscape website.

Our plants from South Africa arrive at the British Museum

Discover the plants

Visit Kew's South Africa Landscape

Follow Kew's South Africa Landscape online

South Africa Landscape blog - Follow Kew's team as they build and tend to the Landscape
Watch the video - After 2 weeks at sea, our plants from South Africa arrived at the British Museum. But what shape were they in?
South Africa Landscape on Flickr - See our Landscape take shape