2nd International Congress of Alpine and Arctic Botanical Gardens

Kew’s Alpine House – what’s the point?
Katie PRICE
Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, United Kingdom
A general question is why we should use our limited resources to grow and display alpine plants in a lowland
botanic garden. The talk explores the work of the Alpine and Rock Garden units at the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, explains the technology behind the new Davies Alpine House and shows some of the landscaping
and cultivation techniques both in the nursery and the display house.
At a congress for gardens situated at
high altitudes, which offer optimum conditions
for the cultivation of a huge range of plants, the
obvious question is, what is the point of trying to
grow alpines in a lowland garden such as Kew?
There are many obstacles to successful cultivation
at Kew: the increasingly warm, dry summers
of south-east England mean that many
of the plants have to survive temperatures far
beyond their natural limits; the mild, wet winters
threaten those which, in their native habitats,
spend up to nine months in cool, dry dormancy,
wrapped in a protective blanket of snow.
But there are five compelling reasons to maintain
an alpine collection at Kew: duty, beauty, science,
education and horticulture.
First, duty: as the national botanic garden for
England, Kew is obliged to maintain a national
botanical reference collection, representing as
many plant families as possible from as many
parts of the globe as possible. Mountains cover
25% of the world’s landmass, so the mountain
flora is a critical part of that reference collection.
Even if it were the only justification, then surely
beauty would be reason enough. The diverse
beauty of the mountain flora is explored through
four distinct areas in the north-eastern zone of
the Gardens: the Woodland Garden, which concentrates
on herbaceous woodland plants; the
Rock Garden; the Alpine House and the Alpine
Nursery. The alpine collections contain dramatic
species from six continents. South American
flora includes plants from the barren, windswept
uplands of Patagonia – Petunia patagonica and
Calceolaria uniflora, the extraordinary Leontochir
ovallei from the coastal mountains of Chile’s
Atacama Desert; from New Zealand comes
Education Concepts 39