Profile of a place: Kew Gardens

The name Kew has always intrigued me. If I had a pound for every time Matt Biggs says 'when I was at Kew' on Gardeners Question Time, I would not exactly be rich, but I'd certainly be able to buy him a couple of elderflower pressés. I knew that Kew was one of the UK's leading botanic gardens and a UNESCO World Heritage Site to boot, but it was only when I visited last weekend that I understood quite how important a role Kew plays in a number of spheres.

Kew Gardens is, like Wisley or Westonbirt Arboretum, synonymous with the top standards in horticulture and high quality botanical research, and this is not without good reason. It is pristinely maintained, each plant labelled with its scientific name and date of collection. Narratives, such as the relevance of certain plants to humans, are pulled out through interpretation that often goes far beyond a bare fact sheet. A particular theme that Kew is highlighting at the moment is spices; so jars of spice, dried samples, and smelly boxes (as well as fact sheets) can be found right beside the growing specimens and larger ad hoc exhibitions are set up elsewhere in the garden.

But its collections are not just of interest to botanists. After all, the garden is laid out as just that - a landscape garden. Like any well-designed space, the paths and follies of Kew tease and excite the visitor as they walk through the 300 acre site. Kew also boasts a number of spectacular vistas - from the Cedar Vista that radiates out from the Pagoda, to the Pagoda Vista that reaches 850 metres to the Palm House. But while there are open spaces and views, there are also copses and nooks aplenty: paths that twist around the blooming rhododendrons, trunks of fallen trees laid out to form a log trail through a woodland area, and even a human sized badger sett. It is almost possible to get lost in Kew, or at least feel that there is always more to see.

As such, Kew provides both wonderful 'green lung' and open space for Londoners and an exciting experience for visitors to London, too. And the novel means Kew employs to engage visitors are also self-sustaining. For example, in a case of 'when life gives you lemons, make lemonade', the woodland log trail is actually constructed exclusively from trees that fell in the 2013-14 storms. As children and adults clamber along the surprising length of log walkway, they can see the species name carved into each tree, providing another point of interest. This combines to make it a simple yet effective reutilisation of resource the actually improves visitor experience, and surely provides good, if indirect, return on investment.

Kew also showcases some impressive large-scale innovations. One in particular is the treetop walkway, a canopy-level path that passes through and around a plantation of chestnuts at a near-vertiginous height of 50 ft. At first, I wondered how this feat would have been possible in a botanic garden and a UNESCO World Heritage Site at that. But the real success of the walkway is its subtlety. Certainly, at ground level beside the struts, the structure is hard to miss. 

However, clever selection of materials and positioning combine to blend the feature naturally into its surroundings: rusted steel, shaped into tree-like supports, holds the walkway, which passes inside and within the copse, i.e. hardly visible from outside and not a perceptible blot on any of the garden's great vistas. More than this, the walkway is totally accessible, giving all visitors a unique opportunity to see trees from a completely different perspective, creating an visitor attraction in itself. Far from a gimicky commercialisation of veteran trees, this is a great example of how to engage visitors with natural heritage in an innovative yet sensitive way.

As a postscript, Kew's contributions to research don't stop at the gates. Sited 40 miles away at Wakehurst Place is the Millennium Seed Bank, a sort of gold reserve meets sperm bank of the botanical world. Kew coordinates the project to collect seeds from 25% of the world's flora by 2020, with the aim of preserving embryonic plant life in case of species' extinction. The implications of this are actually pretty cool (literally): working with partners in exotic places, the Millennium Seed Bank receives the seeds of wild but often highly endangered plants and stores them in sterile and climate-controlled storage vaults. As a result, the Bank will provide a freeze-frame of plant life from habitats as diverse as the steppes of Kyrgystan to the mountain ranges of New Zealand - but more importantly gives us a back-up plan for species threatened by changing land use, pests, pathogens and climate change. I hasten to add that I have not yet visited the Millennium Seed Bank, but I feel this certainly cues (or Kews?) a trip!