Kew Gardens: A Deep Dive into the World's Most Important Botanical Garden
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew is the most scientifically important botanical garden in the world. Founded in 1759 as a royal pleasure garden, transformed into a research institution under Joseph Banks and Joseph Dalton Hooker, Kew houses 50,000 living plants, 7 million herbarium specimens, and one of the world's largest seed banks.
Origins as royal garden
Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, founded Kew as a botanical garden in 1759 on the grounds of her royal residence. Lord Bute and the architect William Chambers laid out the early garden, including the Chinese Pagoda (1762) and the Orangery (1761).
Joseph Banks and global botany
Banks, who travelled with Captain Cook on the Endeavour voyage, became Kew's unofficial director from 1772 and sent collectors all over the world. His network turned Kew into the hub of global plant exploration.
The Palm House (1848)
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner's curvilinear iron-and-glass structure remains the most architecturally important glasshouse in the world and a key influence on later iron architecture.
The Temperate House (1863)
Burton's larger glasshouse, the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world, restored 2013-2018 at a cost of £41 million.
Joseph Dalton Hooker and the herbarium
As director from 1865 to 1885, Hooker built the herbarium into a global reference collection. His son William continued the tradition.
Millennium Seed Bank
Kew's Wakehurst sister site holds the world's largest wild plant seed collection, with over 2.4 billion seeds from 40,000 species — a project to bank the genetic diversity of global flora before climate change destroys it.
UNESCO and present
Kew was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. Today it receives around 2 million visitors a year, runs research programmes on every continent, and maintains around 320 scientific staff.
Explore on the map
All of the gardens mentioned in this article are pinned on the interactive map. Use it to plan a route, group nearby sites into a single trip, or compare gardens by style and season.