Feats of Nature and the World's Largest Lily Pad

Kew Gardens caught me off guard.



While I am excited by new potentials for "gardens" (I have been following the High Line since its conception, and am still wow'ed by the green facade on Jean Nouvel's Musee du Quai Branly), I had few hopes of finding innovative landscape in a park I assumed would be "beautiful" in the most traditional sense of the word.

When I think of the quintessential "Royal Botanic Garden," I immediately picture a menagerie of pastel pastorals. On my daily jog through Regent's Park, I make a point to run through Queen Mary's traditional rose garden. As I whiz through the Indian Summers', Britannias', and other appropriately named flowers, I am confronted by the controlled hand of a methodical planner with an affliction for symmetry and circles.

Therefore, when I think of the quintessential English garden, I DO NOT picture mammoth lily pads, the world's tallest indoor plant, tropical rainforests, a Japanese pagoda, cutting-edge 19th century engineering and architecture, seedbanks, a thriving educational system, and a bamboo forest; all features of Kew's three-hundred glorious acres. As a result, to say my trip last Friday was a pleasant surprise would be a huge understatement.

From an architectural standpoint, Kew Gardens is particularly dynamic due to its inclusion of Decimus Burton's unprecedented greenhouse architecture of the 1850's. In his Palm house, a repetitive, bending frame designed by iron-maker Richard Turner is covered in a translucent skin to allow for light to penetrate the indoor tropical environment.



Once in the building, one can walk above or below the plants via ornate winding staircases. As I ascended the iron spiral staircase to scale the catwalks amongst the palms, I was shocked to see bouts of steam released to sustain the rich tropical vegetation.

After several hours of wandering, a brief encounter with some domesticated peacocks, and a sketching marathon of Henry Moore sculptures, my classmates and I sat on the grass and reflected on our perfect fall day. While it didn't hurt that the weather was crisp and clear, the astounding range of plant life and variation of Kew's indoor/outdoor environments gave us a worthwhile glimpse into the world's incredible biological and ecological diversity. Just thirty-minutes outside central London, Kew Gardens is a slice of utopia I plan to revisit.