Kew Gardens

Royal residences in the area later influenced the layout and construction of the gardens. In 1299 Edward I moved his court to a manor house at neighbouring Richmond, then called Sheen; that house was later abandoned, and in 1501 Henry VII built Sheen Palace, which under the name Richmond Palace became his permanent royal residence. Around the start of the sixteenth century courtiers attending Richmond settled at Kew and built large houses of their own. Among the earliest royal residences at Kew was Mary Tudor's house, in existence by 1522, when a driveway was built to connect it to the palace at Richmond.

Around 1600 the land that became the gardens was known as Kew Field, a large area strip farmed by one of the new private estates. In about 1631 the Dutch merchant Samuel Fortrey built the brick house, laid in Flemish bond, that is now Kew Palace, the smallest of the British royal palaces. The garden itself began as the exotic garden at Kew Park, formed by Henry Capell, 1st Baron Capell of Tewkesbury, and enlarged and extended by Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, the widow of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Out of that ground the botanic gardens formally started in 1759.

William Chambers built several garden structures in the years around the foundation: the Temple of Arethusa in 1758, the Ruined Arch as a decorative folly in 1759-60, the Temple of Bellona in 1760, the Orangery in 1761 and the Temple of Aeolus in 1763, the last replaced by Decimus Burton in 1845. Three of the temples were originally named to honour British victories in the Seven Years' War and were eventually attached to the warships HMS Arethusa, HMS Bellona and HMS Aeolus, and the walls of the Temple of Bellona carry the names and numbers of the British and Hanoverian units connected with that war. The Great Pagoda, of ten octagonal storeys, is dated to 1761 by one account and to 1762 by another. The Orangery proved too dark for the citrus plants it had been built for, and they were moved out in 1841.

The collections grew somewhat haphazardly until the appointment of the first collector, Francis Masson, in 1771, and some of the early plants came from the walled garden established by William Coys at Stubbers in North Ockendon. Capability Brown, who became England's most renowned landscape architect, applied for the position of master gardener at Kew and was rejected. Five trees survive from the establishment of the botanical gardens in 1762 - a ginkgo, a pagoda tree, an oriental plane, a black locust and a Caucasian elm - known together as the 'Five Lions'.

The origins of the gardens as one place can be traced to the merging of the royal estates of Richmond and Kew in 1772. George III enriched them, aided by William Aiton and Sir Joseph Banks. He had a cottage built for his wife, Queen Charlotte, at some point before 1771, and in 1781 he bought the adjoining 'Dutch House' as a nursery for the royal children. The old Kew Park, by then renamed the White House, was demolished in 1802. The boundary wall became a local institution in its own right: The Epicure's Almanack recorded in 1815 that the east wall, "extending more than a mile in length", had been enlivened by "a poor mendicant crippled seaman" who had chalked on it every man-of-war of Britain's Royal Navy, and who returned annually to the spot "to refit his ships" and raise supplies from the gratuities of the charitable.

In 1836 William IV had the conservatory originally designed for Buckingham Palace moved to Kew, where it served as the Aroid House and is now the Nash Conservatory. King William's Temple followed in 1837, built by Sir Jeffery Wyatville and first called The Pantheon, its inner walls set with cast-iron panels commemorating British military victories from Minden in 1759 to Waterloo in 1815. In 1840 the gardens were adopted as a national botanical garden, in large part due to the efforts of the Royal Horticultural Society and its president William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire. Under Kew's director William Hooker the gardens were increased to 30 hectares and the pleasure grounds, or arboretum, extended to 109 hectares; the first curator was John Smith. From 1845 the gardens had their own police force, the Kew Constabulary, attested under section 3 of the Parks Regulation Act 1872 and holding the same powers as the Metropolitan Police within the land belonging to the gardens.

The Palm House was built between 1844 and 1848 by the architect Decimus Burton and the iron-maker Richard Turner, and was the first large-scale structural use of wrought iron; its panes were all hand-blown, and were originally tinted green with copper oxide to reduce the heating effect. Two coal-fired boilers heated it, venting through a chimney 107 feet high near the Victoria Gate, and coal came in by a light railway running in a tunnel in human-propelled wagons, the tunnel doubling as the flue between boilers and chimney until the distance proved too great for efficient working and two small chimneys were added to the house itself. The railway was electrified in 1950.

Victoria amazonica, then the largest known species of the water lily family, reached Kew in February 1849 in vials of clean water, after several earlier attempts to transport seeds and roots had failed; the Waterlily House, its ironwork again by Richard Turner, was completed for the plant in 1852, but the house did not suit it - purportedly for want of ventilation - and the specimen was moved to a smaller house. Museum No. 1, designed by Burton and opened in 1857, held the economic botany collections of tools, ornaments, clothing, food and medicines, its aim to illustrate human dependence on plants, and the Timber Museum opened in 1863. The Temperate House was commissioned in 1859 to designs by Burton and Turner and took forty years to construct, costs soaring during the work. Kew was also the location of the successful nineteenth-century effort to propagate rubber trees for cultivation outside South America, and in 1876 its director Joseph Dalton Hooker and his assistant William Turner Thiselton-Dyer established the Jodrell Laboratory, named for the scientific benefactor Thomas J. Phillips Jodrell.

The Jodrell was one of the world's first laboratories of its kind not affiliated to a university, founded as a base for researchers in plant physiology, anatomy and embryology, fossil botany and mycology. Dukinfield Henry Scott was Assistant Keeper from 1892 to 1906, and the resident and visiting researchers of those years included the structural botanists Ethel Sargant and Wilson Crossfield Worsdell, the cell biologist Walter Gardiner, the marine biologist Felix Eugen Fritsch, the physiologist Joseph Reynolds Green and the palaeobotanists William Henry Lang and Frederick Orpen Bower. The plant anatomist Charles Russell Metcalfe, Keeper from 1930 to 1969, established it as a centre for systematic botany, and was followed by the cytogeneticists Keith Jones, Keeper from 1969 to 1987, and Michael David Bennett, from 1987 to 2006. The original single-storey building was replaced by a larger one in 1965 and extended by the Wolfson Wing in 2006.

The laboratory spawned others: the Laboratory of Plant Pathology at Harpenden in 1920, the Imperial Bureau of Mycology at Kew in 1930, and the Millennium Seed Bank, which first relocated to Kew's Wakehurst Place in 1993 as the Physiology Section. The herbarium holds approximately 7 million specimens, growing by some 30,000 a year through international collaborations, and the fungarium about 1.25 million dried fungi; the library and archives run to over half a million books, botanical illustrations, photographs, letters and manuscripts, periodicals and maps. Under an agreement signed in 1962 the scope of the collection generally does not overlap that of the Natural History Museum in London, which concerns itself with the flora of Europe and North America.

Kew advises police forces where plant material may provide evidence; in one case its forensic scientists established that the stomach of a headless corpse found in the Thames contained a highly toxic African bean. The world's smallest water lily, Nymphaea thermarum, was saved from extinction when Kew grew it from seed in 2009, and in 2022 Kew scientists identified a new species of Victoria waterlily, Victoria boliviana, that had been growing in the gardens for over 170 years.

Cambridge Cottage, the former residence of the Duke of Cambridge (1819-1904), became part of the gardens in 1904 and opened in 1910 as the Museum of British Forestry; after 1958 it was known as the Wood Museum and displayed samples of wood from around the world. The Chokushi-Mon, a four-fifths scale replica of the karamon of the Nishi Hongan-ji temple in Kyoto, was built for the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910 and moved to Kew in 1911. In February 1913 the suffragettes Olive Wharry and Lilian Lenton burned down the Tea House during a series of arson attacks in London. The Temple of the Sun, designed by Chambers in 1761 in imitation of the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek, was destroyed by a falling tree in the storm of 27 March 1916, though some accounts give 28 May.

The memorial to the several Kew gardeners killed in the First World War was designed by Sir Robert Lorimer in 1921 and lies in the nearby church of St Luke's; two benches in the gardens, the Remembrance and Hope seat and the Verdun Bench, contain parts of an oak grown at Kew from an acorn brought from the battlefield of Verdun, the tree having been damaged by a storm in 2013 and removed. During the Second World War holes were cut in each floor of the Great Pagoda to allow for the drop-testing of model bombs. The Australian House, a gift from the Australian government, opened in 1952; ten Portland stone replicas of James Woodford's Queen's Beasts were placed in front of the Palm House in 1958; and from 1959 to 2007 Kew had the tallest flagpole in Britain, made from a single Douglas fir from Canada to mark both the centenary of British Columbia and the bicentenary of the gardens, and taken down after damage by weather and woodpeckers made it a danger.

Hundreds of trees were lost in the Great Storm of 1987. On 30 September that year the gardens were given a Grade I listing on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, and in the same year Diana, Princess of Wales, opened the Princess of Wales Conservatory, designed by Gordon Wilson to replace 26 smaller buildings and named in commemoration of her predecessor Augusta's associations with Kew; it received the Europa Nostra award for conservation in 1989. In July 2003 UNESCO put the gardens on its list of World Heritage Sites. Kew Palace, restored by Donald Insall Associates, reopened in 2006 and is administered separately from the gardens by Historic Royal Palaces, as is Queen Charlotte's Cottage. The Great Pagoda reopened under the same body in 2018 with eighty dragons remade for its storeys; the originals had been wood painted gold rather than the solid gold of the tale that George IV sold them to settle his debts, and had rotted away. A five-year, £41 million revamp of the Temperate House was completed in May 2018. In November 2025 the Waterlily House closed for renovation with a reopening intended for 2027, and in 2025 Kew announced that the Palm House would close in 2027 for a five-year renovation of its own. The gardens are managed, together with the botanic gardens at Wakehurst in Sussex, by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs which employs over 1,100 staff.