The Gardens began hundreds of years ago as a collaboration between the British royal family and a long train of brilliant horticulturists, architects, landscape architects, and scientists.
Sir Joseph Banks, who circumnavigated the world with Captain James Cook in 1768-71, established Kew as a definitive repository of the world's plants. By the early 1800s, virtually no ship left any port of Britain's far-flung and growing empire without seeds or plants for Kew collections.
To visit Kew and its gleaming glass conservatories is to enjoy in a matter of hours an empire of greenery that knows no boundaries.
