Wedding Photographer Royal Botanic Gardens Kew — the Palm House, the Temperate House and the Garden Landscape
The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew is the world’s most comprehensive botanical garden collection — a UNESCO World Heritage Site of 132 hectares on the Surrey bank of the Thames at Richmond, housing approximately 27,000 living plant species in collections ranging from the Victorian iron-and-glass palm houses to the Japanese garden, the Treetop Walkway and the 1761 Great Pagoda designed by William Chambers. For Kew Gardens wedding photography, the combination of Victorian monumental glasshouse architecture (the Palm House of 1848 and the Temperate House of 1862, the two largest Victorian glasshouses in the world), the Japanese pagoda landscape, the lake and the woodland garden provide a portrait environment of extraordinary botanical and architectural variety unmatched by any other single wedding venue location in London.
The Palm House, the Temperate House and the Victorian Glasshouses
The Palm House — Decimus Burton and Richard Turner’s 1848 curvilinear iron-and-glass structure, the first large-scale use of wrought iron in a major public building — provides both interior and exterior portrait settings of extraordinary Victorian industrial botanical character: the building’s curved ship-hull form in iron and glass, the formal rose parterre before the south facade and the pond reflecting the building’s white paint and the sky provide exterior portrait settings of formal Victorian institutional grandeur. The Temperate House — the world’s largest surviving Victorian glasshouse at 4,880 square metres, reopened in 2018 after restoration — provides an interior plant landscape of a scale and tropical luxuriance found nowhere else in the United Kingdom. The Waterlily House and the Princess of Wales Conservatory provide additional interior botanical portrait settings of extraordinary plant-density and colour.
The Japanese Garden, the Treetop Walkway and the Thames Landscape
The Minka House and the Japanese Landscape Garden — including the Japanese Gateway, the traditional timber building and the planted garden of moss, smooth stones, raked gravel and clipped bamboo — provide a portrait setting of Japanese garden design that is completely distinct from anything else at Kew and provides images of specific Eastern garden aesthetic character. The 18-metre high Treetop Walkway through the treetops of Kew’s oak and ash woodland provides elevated portrait settings looking down through the canopy — a specific aerial-forest portrait perspective available at very few venues. The Thames towpath at Kew’s eastern boundary, with the river’s broad reach and the Richmond Bank houses beyond, provides a riverside portrait setting in direct contrast to the botanical interior at very short walk from the wedding venue.