Kew Gardens Botanical Greenhouses

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in southwest London is home to some of the most iconic glasshouses in the world. The crown jewel is the Palm House, a sweeping Victorian iron-and-glass structure completed in 1848 and designed by Decimus Burton and engineer Richard Turner. Its graceful curvilinear form houses a dense tropical rainforest environment, including some of the oldest potted plants on Earth. Nearby stands the Temperate House, the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse anywhere in the world, which reopened after a painstaking five-year restoration in 2018 and shelters over 10,000 plants from temperate climates across the globe. Beyond these Victorian masterpieces, Kew's greenhouse collection includes the striking Princess of Wales Conservatory, opened in 1987, which contains ten different climate zones under a single angular glass roof — from arid desert to humid tropical — and is home to the giant Amazonian water lily (Victoria amazonica) as well as a remarkable collection of carnivorous plants and orchids. Together, Kew's glasshouses form a living museum that supports the gardens' status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, underpinning vital scientific research into plant conservation at a time when thousands of species face extinction in the wild.