Since this book was first published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and much of it is based on Kew resources, it is appropriate that a brief history of Kew be included.
Popularly known as Kew Gardens, it extends over 121 hectares (300 acres) beside the Thames River in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames. It was founded as a private royal estate and garden in the eighteenth century by Frederick, Prince of Wales and his wife Augusta. When Frederick suddenly died in 1751 Princess Augusta continued to develop the garden with many exotic trees and other plants. When she died in 1772, her son, who had become George III, not only doubled the area by incorporating his own neighbouring garden, but appointed the famous scientist Sir Joseph Banks as the unofficial director. Banks set about running Kew on a scientific basis by sending horticultural botanists to little-known parts of the world in order to enrich Kew’s living collections.
When both Banks and his patron died in 1820 these royal gardens declined. By 1838 the Treasury of the day wanted to save expense on the various royal properties, including Windsor, Hampton Court, Buckingham and Kensington palaces, as well as Kew. A working party under the chairmanship of Professor John Lindley was appointed to report on the state of royal gardens. They agreed that the situation was dire at Kew and that there was little need for its maintenance now that the palace was no longer a royal residence. But Lindley’s report favoured Kew’s development into a National Botanic Garden for the benefit of the colonies in the British Empire. However, this would involve much additional expense and it was only after considerable delay that Sir William Hooker, Professor of Botany at Glasgow University was appointed in 1841 as the first official Director of Kew under the Department of Woods and Forests. Large greenhouses for temperate and tropical plants were built and the general public was encouraged to visit for recreational and educational purposes.
Subsequently, Kew developed close associations with gardens in various territories, such as Singapore, Calcutta, Peradenya, Jamaica and others in Africa. Indeed, the large and increasing collection of dried specimens in the Herbarium enabled Kew botanists to prepare ‘colonial floras’ such as the Flora of Tropical Africa and the Flora Capensis describing all the plants then known from these areas. Today, the Herbarium collections are estimated as some seven million specimens. Many thousand botanical books and journals are also held, together with an unrivalled collection of botanical illustrations. Close association with many of these now independent countries has continued through field work by Kew staff with scholars and researchers in those countries, and through international courses on conservation and plant techniques based at Kew.
Sir William Hooker had established in 1848 the world’s first museum devoted to plants useful to people, and a resultant collection of more than 81,000 items is now housed in compactor cabinets in the Sir Joseph Banks Centre for Economic Botany, with everything listed on a database. It is here that the Tutankhamun collection is based. Like the Herbarium, these collections are closed to the public, although accessible to visiting researchers and scholars. The original museum building is now the School of Horticulture for the training of students for the Kew Diploma of Horticulture. The Plants + People exhibition in the renovated Museum No 1 at Kew displays more than 450 plant-based treasures from the collection.
In 1877 the Jodrell Laboratory - named after its donor, Thomas Jodrell Phillips-Jodrell - was opened at Kew for research on plant and fungal physiology. Much wider interests soon developed, including plant anatomy, cytology and the current research on microbiology, plant biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology.
In 1965 Kew took over from the National Trust the management of Wakehurst Place, a 700-acre estate in Sussex with a moister, cooler climate than prevails at Kew. It is now the base for the Millennium Seed Bank which houses an increasing represention of the seeds of the world’s flora, and already nearly 100% of the British flora. This highlights the importance of Kew’s current research and mission ‘to inspire and deliver science-based plant conservation worldwide, enhancing the quality of life’.
Given the wide expertise of the staff of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the historic plant collections, it is no wonder that material from the famous discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun should have been brought to Kew for identification, as related in the following pages.
World History
