“Generally regarded as the largest and best-equipped gardens in the world,” says the encyclopedia of Kew. Certainly it is the centre of at least the Commonwealth’s entire botanical research.
Encroaching industry and London’s smoke (even though those menacing gasworks have now been closed) have made the cultivation of delicate plants and trees increasingly difficult at Kew however, and in 1964, when the National Trust offered the lease of Wakehurst Place in Sussex, Kew’s Director, Sir George Taylor, and the Ministry of Agriculture jumped at the chance.
Unique plants
Here were gardens begun centuries ago but brought to perfection in this century by the Loder family - the walled kitchen garden an almost readymade nursery for what, in the seventies or the eighties at least, will be England’s new Kew-in-the-country.
Here, too, were woodlands half as big again in acreage as Kew itself: a tract of the old St Leonard’s Forest harbouring unique English plants and, elsewhere, trees gathered from the earth’s four corners - the giant California redwood, the handkerchief tree that flutters its white flags in high summer, the eucryphia now, in August, smothered white as a camelia, the magnificent magnolia Campbellii that in spring is rose-pink, with blooms 10 inches across.
Wakehurst offers more exciting possibilities of landscaping than Kew. The woods plunge down steep hillsides to lakes and the Ardingly brook. The leaf-mould lies deep, and the kindly sandstone, bare only on the steeps, holds the abundant rainfall against the dry spells that come even to upland Sussex. A pleasant change for Kew gardeners, who for 200 years have had to feed and water greedy Thames-side grave!
A half-dozen men from Kew have already joined the Wakehurst men who carried on from the days of the late Sir Henry Price (who bequeathed the estate to the National Trust). Kew scientists are moving steadily through the woods marking every tree, noting their new prizes and making sure that encroaching undergrowth or unwanted competitors are removed. “We try to give every tree its full landscape value,” explained Mr R. W. King, secretary of the Royal Botanic Gardens.
Swans moved
Two of Kew’s famous black swans have already been moved to join the ornamental ducks on the great lake at Wakehurst.
The Wakehurst gardens are still firmly closed to the public and they cannot for any predictable time yet become a place of public and holiday resort such as Kew.
How long will the transformation take? We should be straight in 10 or 20 years, said Mr King, though with a twinkle in his eye. And when will we, the general public, have a chance to see the transformed Wakehurst-Kew? That, I gathered, depends, like so much else, on our austere Treasury, on tiresome things like exports and so ultimately, I suppose, on us.
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