Kew Gardens
— — a glasshouse the size of a cathedral, full of palms.
Not only on a wall.
“Three hundred and twenty-six acres of botanic garden on the south bank of the Thames, founded in 1759 as the private pleasure garden of a royal residence. The Palm House is the centrepiece — wrought iron and curved glass, built when neither material had quite been used this way before. Inside, the air is warm and wet and smells of soil. The pagoda further down the long walk is even older. The herbarium holds more than seven million pressed specimens. from the studio
Kew Gardens, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, occupy 132 hectares — about 326 acres — on the south bank of the Thames in Richmond, southwest London. Founded in 1759 as a royal pleasure garden under Princess Augusta, Kew became a national botanic institution in 1840 under William Hooker. UNESCO inscribed the gardens on its World Heritage List in 2003. The living collection holds more than 50,000 plant species; the herbarium and Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst hold preserved material and seed from a substantial fraction of the world's known vascular plants.
The Palm House, designed by Decimus Burton and the iron founder Richard Turner and completed in 1848, was the first large-scale structural use of wrought iron in a building of this kind. Its curved ribs were rolled from new gun-barrel-making technology and the panes were tinted green to filter the light. Nearby, the Temperate House, also Burton's, is the world's largest surviving Victorian glasshouse at 4,880 square metres. The Great Pagoda, designed by William Chambers in 1762, stands ten storeys above the long walk.
Kew is open every day except 24 and 25 December. A timed admission ticket is required and is cheaper bought online than at the gate; Kew members and children under four enter free. The nearest London Underground station is Kew Gardens on the District line, a ten-minute walk to the Victoria Gate. Allow at least half a day; the gardens are too large to take in fully in less. The Treetop Walkway, eighteen metres up among the canopy, is worth the climb.