Kew Gardens
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How it came to be
Kew's botanic garden grew out of the exotic garden that Henry Capell, Lord Capell of Tewkesbury, made at Kew Park. Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales and widow of Frederick, Prince of Wales, enlarged it, and the botanic garden formally began in 1759. The architect William Chambers put up many buildings in the grounds, among them the Orangery, completed in 1761, and the ten-storey Great Pagoda.
The royal estates of Richmond and Kew were merged in 1772, and from the time of Joseph Banks's direction in the 1770s Kew's influence spread internationally. In 1840 it was adopted as a national botanical garden, and under its director William Hooker the grounds were greatly enlarged. The Palm House, built in 1844 to 1848 by the architect Decimus Burton and the ironmaster Richard Turner, was the first large-scale structural use of wrought iron.
In the 19th century Kew succeeded in propagating rubber trees for cultivation outside South America. The Temperate House, commissioned in 1859, took 40 years to build and is the largest surviving Victorian glass structure in the world. The gardens were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2003.
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