page_title: Botanical garden
section_title: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
hierarchical_section_title: Botanical garden / History and development / 18th century / Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
caption_attribution_description: English: A view across the gardens to the Palm House in Kew Gardens, in London, England. This is a 4 segment panoramic image. Visible in the foreground of the palm house are some of the replicas of the Queen's Beasts: the Yale of Beaufort, the Red Dragon of Wales, the White Horse of Hanover, the Unicorn of Scotland, and the Griffin of Edward III. Français&#160;: Vue d'ensemble de la serre à palmiers des jardins botaniques royaux de Kew, Angleterre. Image panoramique à quatre segments.
context_page_description: A botanical garden or botanic garden is a garden dedicated to the collection, cultivation, preservation and display of a wide range of plants labelled with their botanical names. It may contain specialist plant collections such as cacti and other succulent plants, herb gardens, plants from particular parts of the world, and so on; there may be greenhouses, shadehouses, again with special collections such as tropical plants, alpine plants, or other exotic plants. Visitor services at a botanical garden might include tours, educational displays, art exhibitions, book rooms, open-air theatrical and musical performances, and other entertainment.
  Botanical gardens are often run by universities or other scientific research organizations, and often have associated herbaria and research programmes in plant taxonomy or some other aspect of botanical science. In principle, their role is to maintain documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation, display, and education, although this will depend on the resources available and the special interests pursued at each particular garden.
context_section_description: The Royal Gardens at Kew were founded in 1759, initially as part of the Royal Garden set aside as a physic garden. William Aiton (1741–1793), the first curator, was taught by garden chronicler Philip Miller of the Chelsea Physic Garden whose son Charles became first curator of the original Cambridge Botanic Garden (1762). In 1759, the "Physick Garden" was planted, and by 1767, it was claimed that "the Exotick Garden is by far the richest in Europe". Gardens such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1759) and Orotava Acclimatization Garden (in Spanish), Tenerife (1788) and the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid (1755) were set up to cultivate new species returned from expeditions to the tropics; they also helped found new tropical botanical gardens. From the 1770s, following the example of the French and Spanish, amateur collectors were supplemented by official horticultural and botanical plant hunters. This was the great era of European, and especially British, imperialism which was "the means by which ideas, knowledge, styles of economy, politics and goods were given international reach" and justified as the spreading of "civilisation" through "development" and "improvement".
  At this time, England was importing many woody plants from North America, and the popularity of horticulture had increased enormously, encouraged by the horticultural and botanical collecting expeditions overseas fostered by the directorship of Sir William Jackson Hooker and his keen interest in economic botany. At the end of the 18th century, Kew, under the directorship of Sir Joseph Banks, enjoyed a golden age of plant hunting, sending out collectors to the Southern African Cape, Australia, Chile, China, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Brazil, and elsewhere, and acting as "the great botanical exchange house of the British Empire". From its earliest days to the present, Kew has in many ways exemplified botanic garden ideals, and is respected worldwide for the published work of its scientists, the education of horticultural students, its public programmes, and the scientific underpinning of its horticulture.
caption: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, established 1759
  The Palm House built 1844–1848 by Richard Turner to Decimus Burton's designs
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