Kew Gardens

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, lie on the south bank of the Thames in Richmond, south-west London. The gardens grew from the 18th-century royal estates of Kew and Richmond, and the botanic garden formally started in 1759, when Princess Augusta, mother of George III, enlarged an existing exotic garden at Kew Park. Kew became a national botanic garden in 1840.

Over the 19th century Kew became a centre for plant science and for moving useful plants around the British Empire. Its herbarium and library hold millions of specimens, and the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst, run by Kew, stores seeds from tens of thousands of wild species. UNESCO inscribed the gardens on the World Heritage List in 2003.

The gardens cover about 120 hectares. The Palm House, built between 1844 and 1848 by Decimus Burton and Richard Turner, is a curved iron and glass structure filled with tropical plants. The Temperate House, commissioned in 1859 and reopened in 2018 after restoration, is the largest surviving Victorian glass structure in the world. Other landmarks include the ten-storey Great Pagoda designed by William Chambers in 1762, Kew Palace, the smallest of the royal palaces, the Treetop Walkway 18 metres above the ground, and the Princess of Wales Conservatory with ten climate zones.

Entry is by paid ticket. Kew Gardens station on the District line and London Overground is a short walk from the Victoria Gate entrance. Allow at least half a day.

Kew's plant, herbarium and tree collections

Kew's living collection holds more than 50,000 plant species, its herbarium keeps over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens, and the arboretum across the southern two-thirds of the site has more than 11,000 trees. The gardens had 2,250,355 visitors in 2025.

The Hive, opened in 2016, is a 17 metre honeycomb of thousands of aluminium pieces by the artist Wolfgang Buttress, set in a wildflower meadow. It began as a temporary installation and was kept because visitors liked it so much. The Marianne North Gallery, opened in 1882, shows 832 of the Victorian painter's plant studies hung edge to edge, a layout she required to stay unchanged. The Chokushi-Mon, a four-fifths scale copy of a gateway at Nishi Hongan-ji in Kyoto, came to Kew in 1911 after the Japan-British Exhibition.

Kew Palace was built around 1631 by the Dutch merchant Samuel Fortrey, later bought by George III, and reopened in 2006 after restoration. The Great Pagoda once carried eighty dragons of wood painted gold, not solid gold as legend claims, and the pagoda reopened under Historic Royal Palaces in 2018 after renovation. The Waterlily House, with a round pond more than 10 metres across, is closed for renovation and due to reopen in 2027.