Waterlily House, month by month

The Waterlily House is one of Kew’s smallest glasshouses, but is easily one of the busiest attractions! Here is housed a giant waterlily, Victoria cruziana, and countless other tropical gems and floral delights. The house was built in 1852 specifically to house the larger and more famous species, Victoria amazonica, using the same iron work detail provided by Irishman Richard Turner who built the nearby Palm House. Unfortunately the V. amazonica was never happy here and is now planted in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, but the Santa Cruz waterlily flourishes and the lipped-rimmed leaf pads add greatly to the display in this small house. Every autumn the house is completely taken apart and removed, with plants, soil, water and even the fish shipped out! The house remains empty during the bleak winter months, and then in spring is restocked and replanted with plants and fish for the summer display. I was luckily enough to help out with the replanting this year and below follows some of the progress and development in the house from reopening in February to the June view yesterday afternoon!

 

 

Sign reads, “Where are the waterlilies? On a winter break!” That break is now over as spring is here

The new compost arrives, the first of many large bags

All of the raised beds are filled by hand!

The final wheelbarrow is filled and then the beds are full

The Tree Gang arrive from the Arboretum to help raise the Nepenthe baskets above the pond

With all of the waterlily planters in place, it is time to fill the pond!

The first planting is the structural foliage specimens such as Calathea and Alocasia

With the waterlilies planted the house opens to the public! The Spanish galleon masthead was a temporary feature for the Easter chocolate festival

Three weeks later the pond is almost filling up!

A distinguished visitor makes a graceful exit

Waterlily stems have these hollow sections contained within them, providing the buoyancy required for the foliage and flowers to rest on the water's surface

A netting of Passiflora provides the necessary shading to satisfy much of the floral bedding display, which prefer dappled-light conditions and can scorch in full sun

The incredible glory of Passiflora alata!

Many smaller hybrids also inhabit the pond; this is Nymphaea carpentaria x violaceae, a cross created at Kew by my old boss Carlos Magdalena

Waterlily foliage is armoured with fierce (painful) spines which deter herbivores and help support the leaf ribs!

The Victoria flowers are, inevitably, both large and glorious!

Another of Carlos' Nymphaea hybrids, and as yet unnamed

Close up in the pond, with more detail of the leaf rim and protective spines!

June view of this wonderful tropical house



Palm House II

 

Sadly, this was the last week of my placement in the Palm House. Three glorious months have passed by in the blink of an eye, and after a brief Easter break all first year students will be recalled to the School of Horticulture to begin a gruelling three months of lectures (pint of coffee please, barkeep!) Working in the Palm House has been an absolute joy, and I’m extremely depressed that my heady, tropical days are over. The work involved was truly splendid, from the day-to-day maintenance such as watering and feeding, plus extra tasks such as pruning the canopy and pollinating cycads. I was responsible for the centre beds in the house, the Americas, with Australasia up in the north end of the house and Africa in the south. The geographic planting works surprisingly well, and the north end in particular has a noticeably different atmosphere to the planting. Tropical plants are fascinating old devils, and it has been great fun noticing and learning about all of the quirks and adaptations they have developed and employ! Amongst the climbing plants you have the Passiflora with their delicately coiled tendrils, quite discreet in their manner, but then you also have the Rattans which lack all of the good manners of the Passiflora and have whips extending from the plant in all directions and covered in hooks! Like pirates throwing grapnels over the side of a ship they are about to board and maraud, the hooks latch on to any plant in the vicinity and enable the Rattans to scramble aboard and grow on up through the canopy. Philodendrons are another tropical climber, typified by huge pointed leaves and dangling aerial roots that look quite fantastic drooping from the host tree. Like our native ivy, this growth can sometimes become too heavy and the tree will collapse underneath. Clearly this is disastrous for our unfortunate host, but the sudden appearance of a gaping hole in the dense canopy is greeted with cheers of delight by all of the seeds, seedlings and young plants lingering around in the darkness below! This small scale clearance serves an important role in the rainforest, but some other clambering eggs are considerably less helpful in their approach. Ficus benghalensis, the banyan tree, climbs up its victim and sends down aerial roots to the ground, but these become like trunks and expand to enormous widths. Inevitably the host is croaked beneath all of this vigorous growth, but instead of opening up light for the other plants below the tree is simply replaced by the voracious fig!

 

The relationships between plants and animals in the rainforest are quite complex, and jolly interesting! Poison dart frogs, for example, raise their tadpoles in Bromeliad species. Bromeliads grow on the branches of trees in the canopy, and their broad leaf bases form a throat that holds water. These private pools are inhabited by the poison dart chaps, and the best territory is fought over bitterly! Cecropia form beautiful trees, and are a pioneer species that will often invade disturbed areas. Their stems have hollow sections within them, and these are inhabited by Azteca ants that protect the tree by attacking predators such as leaf cutter ants! Although banana leaves are quite tough and used as plates by native eggs, they are nevertheless the food plant for the spectacular Owl butterflies, huge beasts from South America that are often seen in English butterfly houses.

 

That is enough tropical prattle for now, I have caught a bug so there will be more to come!

 

The south entrance to the house! Quite futuristic to my mind, it’s surprising the Victorians took to it as warmly as they did

Sunset at the west entrance

Detailing of Turner’s ironwork on the balcony, the spinning disc foliage on the left is Cecropia glaziovii

Bambusa vulgaris has these magnificently marked stems, although the vigorous growth needs checking regularly. This is done by digging out some of the rootstock, and every other year the dense foliage is completely stripped

Aphelandra aurantiaca var. aurantiaca is one of the many flowering plants, and continues its display throughout the year

Sanchezia nobilis is an excellent foliage shrub, good for filling gaps and providing some evergreen structure

Theobroma cacao is certainly not the most beautiful tree in the Palm House, but it is one of the most interesting! The beans found in the large seed pods are the main ingredient in chocolate!

The glorious paddles of Ravenala madagascariensis

Licuala grandis and some detailing of the flowers. Palm flowers are generally small and white

Kew holds the National Collection of Musa species, this here is Musa balbisiana. Bananas are as tall as trees, but are in fact herbaceous plants and the ‘stem’ is merely the tightly packed sheaths of the enormous leaves! The male flower hangs at the end of the flowering stem, while the female flowers are further up and after pollination form the banana fruit

The larva and imago of Caligo memnon, the Owl butterfly! They lay their eggs on Musa species, and are seen here at Stratford Butterfly Farm

Alocasia x amazonica and Philodendron melanochrysum are typical of many tropical leaves, featuring a pronounced ‘drip tip’, an adaptation at the end of the leaf which enables the exceptionally large amounts of rain to drain away from the plant quickly

View from the Palm House balcony along the dramatic Syon Vista. Across the river at the end of this avenue is Syon House, the home of the Duke of Northumberland. In the foreground is the rose garden

A view from up in the canopy, and some more detailing on the pillars

Looking along the roof of the south end!

My manager Wes (Keeper of the Palm House) 16 metres up in the canopy on the ‘nifty lift’. Happy days!



Palm House

 

The Palm House is one of the icons of the Victorian era, and is to this day a landmark of British engineering. Built between 1844 and 1848, it was at the cutting edge of technology and was a major event in the ‘Age of Iron’, begun in the late-1700s by  the pioneering Victorians who were shameless in their strive for advancement and progress. One man, Richard Turner, typified that character, almost bankrupting himself developing the light but strong wrought iron beams used in the construction of the Palm House. Iron was previously used in the building of grand glasshouses at assorted stately homes and botanical gardens in Britain, but it is the curved design and sheer size of the Palm House that makes it such an important structure. The building is 20 metres high and a 100-odd metres in length, with the iron frame holding 16,000 panes of curved glass! This incredible design was realised by the ambition of Turner, who’s understanding of shipbuilding and ‘deck beam’ technology made it possible for the huge expanse of the Palm House to stand with very little internal support. Earlier designs submitted contained far too many columns and pillars which would have hindered the spreading crowns of the magnificent palms; the open structure we see today is both innovative and immensely practical! Turner later claimed to have lost £7,000 during construction, and at the time did not get the credit he deserved for his work. Happily though, the old boy went on to create one of the finest Victorian railway stations in England, building the huge expanse of iron and glass that curves over the platforms of Lime Street Station in Liverpool.

Turner’s ironwork

The Palm House mostly contains palms (more revelations to follow), but fortunately upon opening the house, Kew had an entirely insufficient amount of specimens available to fill the cavernous space! This, fortunately, led to a tradition of a more mixed planting within the house, with an assortment of tropical specimens being grown and displayed here alongside the palms. Victorian families thronged to the house to see the vegetation of the expanding British Empire being cultivated under the curved glass, and this exotic and unusual array continues to this very day! The planting around the house is rather formal, reflective of those Victorian days, with the great landscaper William Nesfield responsible for much of the setting within which the Palm House is placed. Syon Vista and Pagoda Vista radiate from the site on the west side, with both of these tree-lined avenues nearly 1000 metres in length! Syon Vista leads down to the River Thames and affords excellent views of the imposing Syon House on the opposite bank, while Pagoda Vista inevitably leads to the giant Pagoda which is another of Kew’s iconic structures. The Campanile is perhaps the most interesting building in the Palm House environ, an Italianate tower to the south of the pond. This is in fact a chimney, connected to the house via an underground tunnel, and designed to remove any soot and smoke that could smother the glass!

The Campanile, the underground tunnel, and its exact path revealed in the melted snow

Historically, the Palm House has been a rather difficult place to work as a gardener. 10 hour days, endless labour, and not to mention the stifling heat, have all contributed to the infamous legend of working in this great glasshouse. New employees would be ‘tried out’ here to see if they could hack the pace, before being moved on to a permanent position elsewhere in the garden. A gardener found to have committed a misdemeanour was liable for boiler duty; lugging a coke wagon backwards and forwards along the 150-metre underground supply tunnel. A small railway track assisted the repentant egg, but it was dirty, back breaking work! Fumigating the Palm House certainly must have seemed like a punishment, with nicotine pyres lit throughout the house, and the staff actually staying inside for two and a half hours to keep the tobacco parcels burning! One chap, who left Kew in 1910, vaguely recalled being dragged outside by a fellow gardener, after keeling over from the toxic fumes! Thankfully such folly came to an end years ago, and the Palm House is a much safer place to work. A reduced working day and some protective clothing when using chemicals are just two of the perks! I will post more highlights from the Palm House over the course of my placement, but for now here is an introduction to this grand house!

Inside is a controlled jungle, with palms blocking the view and vigorous climbers scrambling overhead! There is a constant balancing act between the display of specimen plants, and creating an overgrown tropical atmosphere

Pandanus is one exciting new species I’ve discovered here, with branching growth and huge strappy leaves! The common name is Screwpine, due to the spiral arrangement of the leaves and pineapple-like fruits

Pritchardia schattaueri is just one of the many incredible palms to be had here. Pritchardia is a tough old species, and makes a good candidate for a houseplant in a well-lit room

Many of the trees in the Palm House harbour epiphytic orchids such as Cattleya deckeri. Epiphytes are plants living on another; not in a parasitic way, just hitching a ride to get closer to the available light and moisture!

Pavonia multiflora is one of the most free-flowering of the plants displayed here, in Malvaceaea family

The foliage of tropical legumes is mesmerising! This is Cojoba arborea

Clerodendrum splendens, a vigorous climber with these incredible blooms! Best grown in a container as it will creep around all over the shop in open soil

Solandra maxima is another glorious climber, native to the tropical Americas. The blooms are night-scented, smelling similar to coconut and pollinated by bats!

The top balcony allows a unique view of the tropical canopy, this is the spreading palms of Ravenea moorei

The delightful iron stairwell leading to the balcony! The spinning disc foliage is Cecropia glaziovii

The very centre of the house is the tallest point, 20 metres, and unfortunately any palm finally attaining this glory is liable to be given the chop! Pruning is impossible, as due to the way palms grow any cut to the central stem results in the death of the plant

More detail of Turner’s handiwork! The large-leaved climber scrambling up the pillar and arch is Epipremnum pinnatum ‘Aureum’

The west of the house looks to Syon Vista, the long avenue leading to the river. The evening light on this side of the house is quite special