Kew Gardens

Kew Gardens (Surrey). Location of the Royal Botanical Gardens, which contain a vast collection of herbs, trees, and shrubs gathered from all over the world. Kew Gardens evolved from two adjoining 18th-cent. royal estates: Richmond Gardens, belonging to George II and Queen Caroline, and Kew House, the residence of their son Frederick, prince of Wales, and his consort Princess Augusta. Charles Bridgeman assisted in the laying out of Richmond Gardens, where William Kent designed the Hermitage (1730) and Merlin's Cave (1735). After George III inherited Richmond in 1760, he had the parkland re-landscaped by Capability Brown (1764–73). At adjacent Kew, following the death of Frederick in 1751, the Dowager Princess Augusta employed Sir William Chambers to lay out the grounds and to embellish them with a variety of temples and garden buildings, some classical and others oriental in style, including the orangery (1757–61), the Alhambra (1758), the Temple of the Sun (1761), and the pagoda (1761–2). These were publicized in Chambers's book Plans, Elevations, Sections and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew in Surrey (1763). Two other major buildings at Kew—both pioneering structures largely in glass and cast iron—are the Palm House (1845–8) by Decimus Burton and Richard Turner, and Burton's Temperate House (1859–62, wings added 1895–7, restored 1977–82). In 1844–8 the area around the Royal Botanic Gardens was landscaped by William Andrews Nesfield (1793–1881), with the Palm House the pivot of his layout.

Peter Willis