ShareSave
Senior Science Journalist
ShareSave
It’s a makeover on a massive scale – it involves moving 1,300 plants, replacing 16,000 panes of glass and cleaning up hundreds of tonnes of iron.
This is the ambitious £50m plan to renovate the world-famous Palm House, which sits at the heart of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.
The hot and humid conditions inside have taken their toll on the building, which opened in 1848 and houses a tropical rainforest.
Kew will also use the refurbishment – which will see the glass house closed for five years from 2027 – to reduce emissions from the Palm House to net zero.
The planning permission for the project has now been submitted, and some of the plants that make up the indoor tropical rainforest have started to be relocated.
“This is probably the plant that I worry about moving the most,” says Thomas Pickering, head of glasshouses.
He’s standing next to one of Kew’s most precious specimens: a plant called Encephalartos altensteinii, which is a type of cycad.
It’s growing in a pot, and at 250 years old, it’s older than the Palm House itself. It’s also enormous – weighing more than a tonne and standing about 4m tall.
“It’s the sheer size of it. It has a huge weight in that root ball, but also this incredibly long stem, which is very old because they’re incredibly slow-growing plants,” says Pickering.
The horticulturists will use scaffolds, supports and braces to protect the plant when the time comes for it to be moved.
