The Royal Botanic Gardens is looking forward as well as back during its 250th anniversary year. Curator Nigel Taylor has just returned from a progress meeting with Gross.Max, the landscape architects commissioned by Kew to carry out the first survey and masterplan of the gardens for more than 160 years.
"We're trying to understand Kew as a historic landscape," says Taylor, "and we're looking at the improvements we could make to ensure that Kew retains its unique quality going forward."
Gross.Max partner Eelco Hooftman says: "The challenge is to pay tribute to the gardens' status as a World Heritage Site, as well as accommodating continuous transformation."
One of the aims is to restore Kew's relationship with the surrounding landscape and the river Thames. Until this year, William Nesfield's 1840s designs marked the last significant effort to connect Kew's two founding estates. The Richmond estates first came together under George III in 1772.
While the royal landmarks remain, the 21st-century Kew has blossomed into a very different place. Until the 1980s Kew's staff were "civil servants, hard-wired into government", says Taylor. They served Britain by propagating plants of economic importance and, latterly, plants of conservation merit.
Then, in 1983, the National Heritage Act turned Kew into a non-departmental public body with exempt charitable status (which, like national museums, means it is not supervised by the Charity Commission).
Today, although government grant-in-aid accounts for 50 per cent of Kew's annual funding, the rest comes from sources including gate income, retail and catering, and donations.
"We've become much more independent," says Taylor. "We need to have the public engage with us. We're marketing ourselves strongly to ensure that visits remain high and the corresponding income comes in."
One of the biggest draws this anniversary year will be the reopening of the restored Marianne North Gallery on 11 October. The Victorian gallery houses 833 paintings representing the life's work of North, a botanical artist who travelled the world during the latter half of the 19th century, capturing images of plants in their native habitats. She commissioned architect James Ferguson to design a classical temple at Kew to house her creations.
Christopher Mills, the head of library, art and archives at Kew, says: "Her idea was that you could go into the Temperate House and look at a particular plant growing. From there, you would wander over to her gallery, where you could sit and look at her paintings to get a much clearer idea of how that plant would look in its natural environment."
For Eleanor Hasler, one of the conservators involved with the two-year project, it's a unique opportunity to work for the only gallery in the UK where all the exhibits on display are by a one female artist. "Having 833 paintings allows us to find out so much more about North, her materials, tools and techniques," she says.
The forensic work is also throwing up surprises: "We're discovering new sketches and inscriptions, which are telling us about how she worked," Hasler says. The most exciting find is a finished painting, hidden on the back of an existing exhibit.
"We're intending to take a very high-resolution image of the painting and have that available as part of the interpretation for the gallery," she says. "People will be able to view this image, which hasn't been seen since Marianne North covered it."
Beyond the preservation work, the actual gallery will appear little changed to visitors, with all of the paintings rehung exactly as North specified.
"It is a gem set in time and that's its charm," says Mills. With the gallery's walls plastered with paintings, the space has always had the "wow" factor. Now, improved lighting will illuminate paintings in the higher areas and touchscreen interactives will allow people to dig deeper into the artist's legacy.
Diversification
While permanence reigns at the Marianne North Gallery, the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art celebrates its first birthday with a changing programme of exhibitions.
This year's offerings have included the Power of Plants, which used historic and contemporary art from the 200,000-strong collection, and the Art of Plant Evolution, which runs to January 2010. This latest exhibition shows botanical paintings in an evolutionary sequence determined by recent DNA analysis.
Kew's art is an attractive and accessible way of introducing visitors to the scientific work going on within the gardens and the botanical collections, believes Mills.
"I'm not a botanist so I fully understand that, while some specimens can be incredibly beautiful, many others do not excite people in the same way as a painting which is full of colour," he says. "Bizarrely, a well-executed painting can look more like the real flower than the actual specimen once it's been dried."
Testament to the crowd-pleasing power of art is the fact that Kew recorded its highest annual attendance in 2007/08 (1.5 million visits), the year it exhibited 28 large-scale Henry Moore sculptures in the gardens. It's a success that the Kew team hopes to repeat with plans for a major outdoor exhibition of land art likely to take place in 2011.
The stakes are high: "Last year, when the weather was bad and the recession was approaching, we just didn't make the income at the gate that we needed to make ends meet," says Taylor.
"We found ourselves at the end of the financial year with a very substantial deficit, which the government helped us out of. It was very much about trading conditions that were outside of our control."
Reassuringly, as of July this year, paying visitors are up between 15 and 20 per cent on last year's figures and attendance overall is up by 10 per cent. However, Taylor hopes that a forthcoming review by Kew's government sponsor, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, will look again at the organisation's funding model.
"One option is to go down the route of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport-funded national museums because, although we have an impressive number of visitors each year, we could engage with a wider community if we were free," he says. "One of the common complaints about Kew is that you used to get in for a penny and now it's £13.
"There are people who really can't afford to come to Kew and they're not getting our message. We feel embarrassed about that, so for our 250th we made 1 January free," Taylor continues. "On one of the less pleasant days of the year, 26,000 people entered Kew. "
Making new connections
Collaborations are another way of reaching new audiences and Taylor highlights Kew's unusual co-existence with Historic Royal Palaces (HRP). HRP is responsible for Kew Palace, George III's country retreat, which is located within Kew Gardens. It charges a separate admission fee for the building, which reopened in 2006 after a £6.6m redevelopment.
"HRP was well ahead of us in terms of community engagement, but now our community outreach officer and theirs work on projects jointly," Taylor says.
"Among the latest discoveries on site are the Georgian kitchens associated with Kew Palace," he adds. "There's a fantastic piece of recent archaeology there, which we hope will be re-presented in a couple of years' time and we're working closely with HRP on that."
Networking is, after all, what botanical gardens such as Kew are based on, "because people who grow plants have always needed to exchange them", says Taylor.
With new collaborations on the cards, Millennium Seed Bank partnerships in place worldwide and international diplomas on offer, Kew's newly inclusive approach signals an exciting future.
Juliana Gillings is a freelance journalist
"We're trying to understand Kew as a historic landscape," says Taylor, "and we're looking at the improvements we could make to ensure that Kew retains its unique quality going forward."
Gross.Max partner Eelco Hooftman says: "The challenge is to pay tribute to the gardens' status as a World Heritage Site, as well as accommodating continuous transformation."
One of the aims is to restore Kew's relationship with the surrounding landscape and the river Thames. Until this year, William Nesfield's 1840s designs marked the last significant effort to connect Kew's two founding estates. The Richmond estates first came together under George III in 1772.
While the royal landmarks remain, the 21st-century Kew has blossomed into a very different place. Until the 1980s Kew's staff were "civil servants, hard-wired into government", says Taylor. They served Britain by propagating plants of economic importance and, latterly, plants of conservation merit.
Then, in 1983, the National Heritage Act turned Kew into a non-departmental public body with exempt charitable status (which, like national museums, means it is not supervised by the Charity Commission).
Today, although government grant-in-aid accounts for 50 per cent of Kew's annual funding, the rest comes from sources including gate income, retail and catering, and donations.
"We've become much more independent," says Taylor. "We need to have the public engage with us. We're marketing ourselves strongly to ensure that visits remain high and the corresponding income comes in."
One of the biggest draws this anniversary year will be the reopening of the restored Marianne North Gallery on 11 October. The Victorian gallery houses 833 paintings representing the life's work of North, a botanical artist who travelled the world during the latter half of the 19th century, capturing images of plants in their native habitats. She commissioned architect James Ferguson to design a classical temple at Kew to house her creations.
Christopher Mills, the head of library, art and archives at Kew, says: "Her idea was that you could go into the Temperate House and look at a particular plant growing. From there, you would wander over to her gallery, where you could sit and look at her paintings to get a much clearer idea of how that plant would look in its natural environment."
For Eleanor Hasler, one of the conservators involved with the two-year project, it's a unique opportunity to work for the only gallery in the UK where all the exhibits on display are by a one female artist. "Having 833 paintings allows us to find out so much more about North, her materials, tools and techniques," she says.
The forensic work is also throwing up surprises: "We're discovering new sketches and inscriptions, which are telling us about how she worked," Hasler says. The most exciting find is a finished painting, hidden on the back of an existing exhibit.
"We're intending to take a very high-resolution image of the painting and have that available as part of the interpretation for the gallery," she says. "People will be able to view this image, which hasn't been seen since Marianne North covered it."
Beyond the preservation work, the actual gallery will appear little changed to visitors, with all of the paintings rehung exactly as North specified.
"It is a gem set in time and that's its charm," says Mills. With the gallery's walls plastered with paintings, the space has always had the "wow" factor. Now, improved lighting will illuminate paintings in the higher areas and touchscreen interactives will allow people to dig deeper into the artist's legacy.
Diversification
While permanence reigns at the Marianne North Gallery, the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art celebrates its first birthday with a changing programme of exhibitions.
This year's offerings have included the Power of Plants, which used historic and contemporary art from the 200,000-strong collection, and the Art of Plant Evolution, which runs to January 2010. This latest exhibition shows botanical paintings in an evolutionary sequence determined by recent DNA analysis.
Kew's art is an attractive and accessible way of introducing visitors to the scientific work going on within the gardens and the botanical collections, believes Mills.
"I'm not a botanist so I fully understand that, while some specimens can be incredibly beautiful, many others do not excite people in the same way as a painting which is full of colour," he says. "Bizarrely, a well-executed painting can look more like the real flower than the actual specimen once it's been dried."
Testament to the crowd-pleasing power of art is the fact that Kew recorded its highest annual attendance in 2007/08 (1.5 million visits), the year it exhibited 28 large-scale Henry Moore sculptures in the gardens. It's a success that the Kew team hopes to repeat with plans for a major outdoor exhibition of land art likely to take place in 2011.
The stakes are high: "Last year, when the weather was bad and the recession was approaching, we just didn't make the income at the gate that we needed to make ends meet," says Taylor.
"We found ourselves at the end of the financial year with a very substantial deficit, which the government helped us out of. It was very much about trading conditions that were outside of our control."
Reassuringly, as of July this year, paying visitors are up between 15 and 20 per cent on last year's figures and attendance overall is up by 10 per cent. However, Taylor hopes that a forthcoming review by Kew's government sponsor, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, will look again at the organisation's funding model.
"One option is to go down the route of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport-funded national museums because, although we have an impressive number of visitors each year, we could engage with a wider community if we were free," he says. "One of the common complaints about Kew is that you used to get in for a penny and now it's £13.
"There are people who really can't afford to come to Kew and they're not getting our message. We feel embarrassed about that, so for our 250th we made 1 January free," Taylor continues. "On one of the less pleasant days of the year, 26,000 people entered Kew. "
Making new connections
Collaborations are another way of reaching new audiences and Taylor highlights Kew's unusual co-existence with Historic Royal Palaces (HRP). HRP is responsible for Kew Palace, George III's country retreat, which is located within Kew Gardens. It charges a separate admission fee for the building, which reopened in 2006 after a £6.6m redevelopment.
"HRP was well ahead of us in terms of community engagement, but now our community outreach officer and theirs work on projects jointly," Taylor says.
"Among the latest discoveries on site are the Georgian kitchens associated with Kew Palace," he adds. "There's a fantastic piece of recent archaeology there, which we hope will be re-presented in a couple of years' time and we're working closely with HRP on that."
Networking is, after all, what botanical gardens such as Kew are based on, "because people who grow plants have always needed to exchange them", says Taylor.
With new collaborations on the cards, Millennium Seed Bank partnerships in place worldwide and international diplomas on offer, Kew's newly inclusive approach signals an exciting future.
Juliana Gillings is a freelance journalist
Planning for growth
This summer, visitors saw a global map made from recycled glass appear on the lawn at Kew's Victoria Plaza. The map highlights where the organisation is working on conservation projects around the world, alongside interpretation boards and a herbaceous display featuring plants from every continent.
Over at the main gate, giant sculptures of seeds and fruits - woven in willow by artist Tom Hare - are complemented by seasonal flower displays. Visitors joined workshops to weave new sculptures, while the Nash Conservatory hosted an exhibition about Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership programme. Online, Kew has digitised information and images on 250 plants.
Off-site, Kew launched The Great Plant Hunt, funded by the Wellcome Trust. As part of this event, which will continue beyond 2009, Kew sent out mock Victorian travelling chests to - so far - 3,000 schools across the UK.
The chests, designed to look like those used by Charles Darwin, are full of information and equipment that children can use to collect, record and grow seeds.
Kew also teamed up with the British Museum, to create an Indian-themed landscape on the museum's forecourt. The attraction, which runs until 27 September, is part of the museum's Indian Summer season, which is centred on Garden and Cosmos, an exhibition featuring paintings from the royal courts of India between the 17th and 19th centuries.
This summer, visitors saw a global map made from recycled glass appear on the lawn at Kew's Victoria Plaza. The map highlights where the organisation is working on conservation projects around the world, alongside interpretation boards and a herbaceous display featuring plants from every continent.
Over at the main gate, giant sculptures of seeds and fruits - woven in willow by artist Tom Hare - are complemented by seasonal flower displays. Visitors joined workshops to weave new sculptures, while the Nash Conservatory hosted an exhibition about Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership programme. Online, Kew has digitised information and images on 250 plants.
Off-site, Kew launched The Great Plant Hunt, funded by the Wellcome Trust. As part of this event, which will continue beyond 2009, Kew sent out mock Victorian travelling chests to - so far - 3,000 schools across the UK.
The chests, designed to look like those used by Charles Darwin, are full of information and equipment that children can use to collect, record and grow seeds.
Kew also teamed up with the British Museum, to create an Indian-themed landscape on the museum's forecourt. The attraction, which runs until 27 September, is part of the museum's Indian Summer season, which is centred on Garden and Cosmos, an exhibition featuring paintings from the royal courts of India between the 17th and 19th centuries.
"I could not imagine a world without Kew Gardens"
David Rae, director of horticulture, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
"RBG Kew's 250 years of great achievements have rightly established it as one of the world's leading botanical institutions. Its work has had national and international impacts.
Kew played a critical role for the burgeoning British empire, making an inestimable contribution to our national wealth and to the sustainable exploitation of plants. Its accumulation of plant reference collections, and library and archive material have established Kew as the leading biological standard for understanding and documenting plant biodiversity.
Its showcasing of the richness of the world of plants and their importance has contributed to public awareness and sets standards that other organisations aspire to follow.
RBG Edinburgh and RBG Kew make the UK the premier global centre for plant diversity conservation, with both institutions, often in harness, repatriating the knowledge accumulated over the centuries for the world's benefit."
Don Murray, chairman of horticulture, Eden Project, Cornwall
"RBG Kew is a garden of international significance which has always been held in high regard by the professional and amateur gardener.
Kew is much more than one of the world's finest showpiece gardens though. It's a respected centre of scientific excellence, identifying and classifying plants, and researching their structure, chemistry and genetics.
It collects and conserves endangered species, maintains reference collections and shares this knowledge throughout the world. This is what underpins Kew's integrity and respect within the global botanic garden community and beyond. I could not imagine a world without Kew Gardens."
David Rae, director of horticulture, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
"RBG Kew's 250 years of great achievements have rightly established it as one of the world's leading botanical institutions. Its work has had national and international impacts.
Kew played a critical role for the burgeoning British empire, making an inestimable contribution to our national wealth and to the sustainable exploitation of plants. Its accumulation of plant reference collections, and library and archive material have established Kew as the leading biological standard for understanding and documenting plant biodiversity.
Its showcasing of the richness of the world of plants and their importance has contributed to public awareness and sets standards that other organisations aspire to follow.
RBG Edinburgh and RBG Kew make the UK the premier global centre for plant diversity conservation, with both institutions, often in harness, repatriating the knowledge accumulated over the centuries for the world's benefit."
Don Murray, chairman of horticulture, Eden Project, Cornwall
"RBG Kew is a garden of international significance which has always been held in high regard by the professional and amateur gardener.
Kew is much more than one of the world's finest showpiece gardens though. It's a respected centre of scientific excellence, identifying and classifying plants, and researching their structure, chemistry and genetics.
It collects and conserves endangered species, maintains reference collections and shares this knowledge throughout the world. This is what underpins Kew's integrity and respect within the global botanic garden community and beyond. I could not imagine a world without Kew Gardens."
Links
www.greatplanthunt.org
www.greatplanthunt.org
