Palm House set for major renovation

A large -scale make -up – the movement of 1,300 plants, replacing 16,000 glasses and cleaning hundreds of tons of iron.

This is an ambitious 50 million pounds plan to renew the world -famous Palm House in the heart of the royal botanical gardens Kew.

The hot and humid conditions inside damaged the building opened in 1848 and hosting a tropical rainforest.

Kew will also use the renewal, which will see closed for five years from 2027 to reduce emissions from Palm House to Net Zero.

The planning permit for the project has now been presented and some plants that make up closed tropical rainforests have begun to move.

“This is probably the plant I’m worried about moving the most,” says Glassoes President Thomas Pickering.

He stands by one of Kew’s most valuable examples: ECEPHArtos altenteiniiSome kind of cycad.

He grows up in a pot and is 250 years old, older than his palm house himself. It is also enormous – more than a tone and is about 4m tall.

Pickering, “This is its size. That root ball has a great weight, but also incredibly long stalk, this is very old because it is incredibly slow -growing plants,” he says.

Horticulture will use piers, support and braces to protect the plant when it is time to move. Other plants, which are a little easier to replace, have already been taken to a temporary greenhouse.

“It will be a long -term project,” Pickering explains.

“And for the next two years, it will be a process to choose which plants we need to cover (in place the pots) and spread them – and some plants will fall because we cannot move them.”

The palm house was built more than 175 years ago and was a wonder of the Victorian era.

No one had previously built a glass house on this scale before, and the engineers did not borrow techniques from the shipping industry to create a large structure.

It was recently renewed in the 1980s, but now he’s intensively rusting in the iron places, so he’ll retreat, be repaired and restored to the naked metal business.

Thousands of single -glazed glass compartments will be replaced and tests will continue to find the best type of glass to provide maximum insulation.

Protecting the temperature of the palm house at 21C uses a lot of energy, but now the gas boilers will be replaced with air source and water -based heat pumps.

“This is an incredibly challenging building to make clear zero,” said Rachel Purdon, President of Sustainability in Kew. He said.

He continued: “We can do a large amount of things such as leaking the glass and heating systems to increase the sustainability of the palm house without affecting aesthetics.”

Located next to the palm house, the water lily house will also be made as part of the renovation. People will be able to visit both for the next two years before they are closed for work.

The Kew team acknowledges that this would be a great initiative that will have a temporary effect on people coming to botanical gardens. But they say the results will be worth it.

“The really important aspect of this is to try and ensure that the structure can take as long as possible before we need to make another renewal.” Says.