The Queen’s Garden: Kew

Committed to beginning the New Year on a productive note, I write about the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Specifically the Queen’s Garden behind Kew Palace (also known as the Dutch House).  Kew Palace is described as a hidden royal home in Kew Gardens with an intimate view of the Great Pagoda. 

In 2017 I wrote Kew Gardens by the Book for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and I have recently reviewed Royal Gardens of the World: 21 Celebrated Gardens from the Alhambra to Highgrove and Beyond by Mark Lane.

The latter includes a section on the history of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.  While reading Lane’s book, with its singular mention of Princess Augusta’s role in the creation of the Royal Botanic Garden, I was curious to revisit the Queen’s Garden with an assumption I would learn more about her time there. 

A serious plant collector with a particular interest in exotics, Princess Augusta is credited with founding the Royal Botanic Garden Kew and its subsequent evolution into the world-famous institution it is today. Working with well-known botanists and designers she commissioned significant landscape and architectural features within the garden.  These include the Orangery, Temple of the Sun, Great Stove, and the aforementioned, iconic Great Pagoda.  When Completed in 1762, the Great Pagoda offered one of the earliest birds-eye views of London.

Surely, writing about the Queen’s Garden would provide a direct (and easy) link to Princess Augusta.  Or perhaps Queen Caroline, who chose Kew as a rural retreat for the Royal family to escape London society. Or perhaps Queen Charlotte who died at Kew Palace in 1818.

I was therefore surprised to discover that it is during the reign of the current Queen, Elizabeth II,  that the Queen’s Garden was created. It was designed in the late 1950s by Sir George Taylor, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew from 1956-1971, and opened to the public by the Queen in 1969.    

Starting with a blank slate, Taylor designed the barely one-acre site located between Kew Palace and the Thames, in the 17th -century style.  It is not modeled after any one particular garden but instead contains features from multiple gardens from the period. 

In The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Ray Desmond describes the garden as a “pastiche of Stuart garden design.” There is indeed a lot going on here, including a geometric parterre, mount, pleached allées, clipped box, statuary and, a fountain.   

The inspiration for each garden element can be attributed to distinct sources. A geometric parterre, which is at the garden’s center, is modeled after an engraved plan of a French garden at Verneuil as depicted in the 1934 book, L’Art des Jardins.

The parterre is enclosed in box hedges. A copy of Verrocchio’s ‘Boy with a Dolphin’, an imitation of the original statue in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, provides a focal point for the central water feature. 

Five 18th century terms commissioned by HRH Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1734/35 are sited within a curved clipped hedge, or exedra, which terminates the parterre.  They are considered to be the oldest pieces of sculpture remaining within the Royal Botanic Gardens. 

The sunken garden contains plants selected for medicinal qualities.  These are limited to those grown in Britain before and during the 17th century.  J. Gerard’s Herball (1597 – 1633) and J. Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629) were used as sources for the planting plans.

Unlike the rest of the Royal Botanic Gardens plants within the Queen’s Garden are labeled with both today’s botanical name and family, and their 17th-century common name.  A virtue or quotation from the appropriate herbal along with the book’s author’s name and date of publication is included.

At the garden’s eastern end is a hornbeam walk. This terminates in a mount capped with a wrought iron gazebo. Incorporated into the gazebo’s design are motifs depicting the national plants of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. It is capped with a gilded finial. 

An allée of laburnum surrounds the sunken garden planted upon an iron frame similar to that of Grey’s Court in Henley.  

The design of the garden included the restoration of steps and arcades, based upon detailed watercolors and paintings of Kew Palace by artist Paul Sandy (1721-1790).  The steps and arcades provide a transition from the Palace to the garden.

Kew Palace was built in 1631 for Samuel Fortrey, a wealthy silk merchant. It is the oldest building in the Royal Botanic Garden and the smallest of all royal palaces. Close to Richmond Lodge, the property was leased in 1728 by George II and Queen Caroline as a country residence for their three eldest daughters.  

In 1818, Kew Palace was closed following the death of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III.  In 1895, it was acquired by the Royal Botanic Garden and reopened through an agreement with Queen Victoria, with the caveat that the room where Queen Charlotte died remain unchanged.  In 1898 Kew Palace opened to the public for the first time.  Today it is cared for by Historic Royal Palaces. 

Inspired by Kew Botanic Gardens for more than sixty years, painter, illustrator and graphic artist Edward Bawden depicted Kew Palace and the Queen’s Garden in a series of lithographs in 1983. These are described as his final images of Kew Botanic Gardens in Edward Bawden’s Kew Gardens by Peyton Skipworth and Brian Webb. 

But back to Princess Augusta.  She did indeed begin the Physic and Exotic Garden in 1759 that became the world-famous Royal Botanic Garden, Kew.  By 1768, the herbaceous collection she nurtured had grown to more than 2,700 species.  And while her legacy may not be found in the Queen’s Garden, it lives on in her plant collection and the Princess of Wales Conservatory.  Opened by Princess Diana in 1987 the Conservatory commemorates her predecessor-to-title, Augusta.  

 

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