The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Abstract

Science can be defined as the philosophical co-ordination of classified information. Accurate identification of the units to be classified is fundamental to all scientific progress, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has as its main function this service to science with respect to plants. By the public generally the Institution is usually regarded merely as an exceptionally beautiful garden and a pleasant resort, because these by-products of its equipment as a research organization are far more conspicuous than those provisions which are more directly concerned with its serious purposes. It will help to place those purposes in true perspective if we review briefly the origin and history of the Institution. Although it is little more than a century since Kew became a National Research Establishment, the development at Kew of a Botanical Garden was the conception of that remarkable woman Princess Augusta, the mother of George III. Thus it was the enterprise and initiative of this individual in her private capacity, establishing an unusual type of garden on her own property, which explains why the largest botanical collections of living plants in the world are located on a rather sterile sandy soil, that from the point of view of culture has many defects and few merits. Sir William Chambers, writing in 1763, alludes to this fact when he says of Kew Gardens, ‘what was once a desert is now an Eden. The judgment with which art hath been employed to supply the defects of nature and to cover its deformities hath very justly gained universal admiration.’ However, in the days when labour was cheap and farmyard manure plentiful, the building up of soil fertility was no hard task. But the impression of a favoured area which visitors to Kew oftqn carry away is a tribute to generations of skilled cultivators whose superb craftsmanship has minimized the intrinsic defects of the soil and the pollution of an atmosphere laden with soot and sulphur dioxide. Thus only thirty years after Princess Augusta began the project Erasmus Darwin (1791) could write, ‘So sits enthroned in vegetable pride Imperial Kew by Thames’ glittering side.’ There are a number of botanical gardens as distinct from Physic Gardens, far older than Kew, such, for example, as those at Padua, and Montpellier, but Princess Augusta when she began to create her garden in 1759 was something of a pioneer in that she collected plants for their own sake, and not merely because they were useful in medicine, or had other economic assets. She was assisted in this task by the Third Earl of Bute, of whom a contemporary wrote that ‘he was unfitted to be Prime Minister on three counts, firstly because he was a Scotsman, secondly because he was a friend of the King and thirdly because he was an Honest m an’. But, however unfitted he was as a politician, he possessed undoubted ability as a botanist and was in effect the first Director of the Gardens.