250 years of Kew Gardens

While not quite as old as the hills, I can remember first visiting the gently undulating Kew Gardens soon after my arrival in London and being asked to part with a token penny at the turnstile.

Bring a product of Norfolk thrift, I confess I then waited - in vain, as it turned out - for change from my proffered 2p piece.

Nowadays the fee for adult entry to this Thames-side haven is a whopping £12.25. And that's after the cost of getting there.

Well, more than a million tourists in the past year may still conclude that even this penal charge is a brilliant bargain, since we can wander in 300 green and flowering acres for a whole day.

Indeed, on that initial visit I lingered unwittingly late into a summer evening, having fallen asleep under one of those glorious trees later to be felled in the Great Gale of 1987. A security guard finally let/kicked me out.

Still, for just £25 - only 50p more than the price of two entrance tickets! - you can tour the wonders of Kew's Royal Botanical Gardens without leaving home thanks to a new 250-picture, 350-page book by Allen Paterson.

The former director of Chelsea Physic Garden makes for an expert guide. So maybe we should plot a major investment by bagging the book and then planning the trip to see the place in the flesh, or rather in the bud, bloom and leaf.

The vast volume celebrates the 250th anniversary of the founding of Kew Gardens in 1759 by Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales as a botanical centre covering all of nine acres. She was advised by Lord Bute (the nearest this hands-off plantswoman ever got to a gardening Bute I bet).

The western part was attached to now-vanished Richmond Lodge, favourite residence of George II. The grounds there had been planned by his wife, Queen Caroline, but they were extensively remodelled by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown in 1770 on the orders of son George III.

It was in his 60-year reign that the sites were united and the resulting botanic garden became famous under the unofficial directorship of Sir Joseph Banks.

Kew Palace, lately restored and reopened behind its fine red façade, was a favourite retreat for the royal family, and in the garden George III's older children were instructed in 'practical gardening and agriculture'. His wife later withdrew here as the king descended into mental derangement.

In 1840 this precious vegetable kingdom was handed to the nation as a result of a Royal Commission - and Norwich-raised, Halesworth-resided Sir William Hooker became the first director, ultimately to be succeeded by his son.

Victoria insisted on retaining the rustic Queen's Cottage set amid 37 wooded acres, scene of many a royal tea party, until this too passed to the people as a gift of thanks for her Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

By that point Kew had become a living museum of seeds, cuttings and saplings from all over an empire on which the sun never set and where fantastic flowers were always open for the pressing business of pollination.

The rolling parkland and formal gardens are dotted with fine structures, ancient and recent - the 163ft, 10-storey Pagoda, raised in a rush in 1762 and then slowly lopped of much ornamentation; folly temples, pavilions and fake ruins; bridges; and great glasshouses from the Temperate House of 1899 to the desert terrain of the Princess of Wales Conservatory whose opening press tour I attended in 1987.

The Marianne North Gallery is a book all in itself, with 832 oil paintings of botanical subjects donated by a gifted and intrepid artist-explorer, along with the wonderful building in which they are housed, in 1882.

But beyond a tour of all the built, planted and dug treasures of the public gardens - the Waterlily Pond, the Holly Walk and Pinetum, the Stag Beetle Loggery and Compost Heap - the beauty of this book lies in a behind-the-scenes study of the world's leading botanical research institute. Despite all those visitors, this is really the key point of Kew.

So we tour the Herbarium where millions of dried and pressed plants have been collected, before moving on to the Jodrell Laboratory and the Millennium Seed Bank - before a final excursion to Wakehurst Place, Kew's sister garden in Sussex.

In keeping with the taste of the times - and the growing ecological threat to the planet - Kew has become rather less about formal planting of late and more awash in wildflowers. From Evolution House it's a lovely walk to the Wildlife Observation Centre. Allen Paterson writes: “Kew's current mission statement - 'To inspire and deliver science-based plant conservation worldwide, enhancing the quality of life' - is perhaps overly modest.

“Ultimately, in the broadest sense, the world of plants permits life: without plants we die.”

The Royal Botanical Gardens beside the Thames now thrive as a World Heritage Site plotting our future planetary survival.

Kew applause, please.

The Gardens at Kew by Allen Paterson is published by Frances Lincoln, price £25.