Even on an overcast day, it is hot in the all-glass Palm House at London’s Kew Gardens. The clammy heat intensifies as you climb the spiral staircase in the graceful Victorian conservatory, up to the second-storey balcony, where you can overlook its jam-packed collection of tropical plants. You experience a different world up there, a pretechnological version of the now commonplace drone view, as your gaze rides over the tops of the arcing green palms. You’re looking down on a thicket of plants and history.
Just for the harrowing thrill of it, even if you’re not a gardener, imagine that you are in charge of renovating this, the most famous tropical greenhouse in the world – the 177-year-old glass and wrought-iron Palm House, the greenly glowing centrepiece of London’s Kew Gardens, one of the largest and most popular curated collections of tropical plants anywhere in the world (1,300 plants and 935 species in the glass house alone, a third of which are threatened), not to mention the living botanical record of the British Empire’s rise and fall.
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