Outside the Brentford Gate of the Royal Botanic Gardens the flood wall of the river displays an unmissable NO VENDORS notice. Beside it is parked an insanitary-looking, dented ice-cream van whose operative is vaguely familiar from somewhere in the dim and . . . So that’s what happened to Plug, the incomparable Bash Street Kid. While I abhor the product he peddles, I sympathise with Plug’s up-yours act of minor defiance. For Kew is increasingly a pedagogic institution, a classroom under the sky. This is among the world’s finest parks. Three hundred acres (120ha) of sylvan enchantment, floral marvels, architectural prodigies. Nobody could stroll through it without a sense of wonder, without their curiosity being whetted, without gratitude, without pleasure. And, I would contend, without learning something.
The proposition that we might be capable of auto-didacticism has been buried by the uncomprehending marketing morons who run our galleries and museums. It is as though Kew had been taken over by the Queen’s Beasts — the Yale of Beaufort, the White Lion of Mortimer and so on. These heraldic inventions ranked outside the Palm House have the features of amiable village idiots, like Benny in Crossroads. They assume that we are all as slow learners as they are, that lessons must be explicit and, of course, accessible. Unhappily, Britain is a country which uncomplainingly accedes to the process of infantilisation: adults read children’s books. So certain species have notices appended to them: “Many of Kew’s mature trees are under stress.” Really. We are taught that biodiversity is a good thing — this is merely botanic relativism: you know, nettles have rights. Defra’s Biodiversity Garden is composed of menhirs like Himmler and Rosenberg’s pseudo-prehistoric Sachsenheim at Verden. Signs in kiddie-friendly script point to Climbers and Creepers (“the UK’s first interactive botanical play area”). Experimental and, mercifully, temporary installations more appropriate to Chelsea Flower Show instruct us thus: “Don’t be afraid to try new combinations of plants and materials.” The new Kew’s motto is “Plants People Possibilities”.
Now and again one comes upon a lump of vapid decorative sculpture which might have been bought in a suburban garden centre — Kew’s very own garden centre, for instance. Kew’s map used to be an annotated OS sheet. Such a map is a code — which has to be learnt. The Queen’s Beasts consider it too difficult. The current map is an easy-to-use horror, with bird’s-eye views of the buildings, a modicum of information, an exhortation to become a Friend of Kew, and the inevitable questionnaire. How do you rate your visit in terms of value for money? A rip-off. Entrance to Kew Gardens was for years almost free — a few old pence, a few new pence, then 50p. Now it is £8.50. An insulting sum given that the bulk of the revenue is apparently directed into interventions that mar the place’s beauty and impair its capacity to delight. Delight is a greater incentive to learning than being preached at in gooey monosyllables. But what delight can we take in the recent additions to Kew’s buildings with the exception of the Visitor Centre’s neo-Brutalist arbours? The Princess of Wales Conservatory — presumably the People’s Greenhouse — and the glasshouses which shelter “Climbers and Creepers” are insultingly paltry beside the Palm House, beside even the lumbering Temperate House. Indeed, there are many more elegant structures in the Vale of Evesham’s commercial fruitholdings. It is regrettable that a fraction of the money prodigally thrown at the trivialisation of Kew is not expended on repairs to the Marianne North Gallery, a monument to critical mass, fearless eccentricity, botanical and geological curiosity, and the amateur spirit. This is a truly bizarre collection. That the strenuously plain building which houses it should be in such ropey condition is a disgrace.
Here’s one thing I learnt — or relearnt — for myself: originality doesn’t pay. Here’s a second: as often as not it is the unfancied half of a duo that will ascend. Next to that gallery is a Victorian lodge which is wackier than most of Kew’s Georgian follies and self-conscious eye-catchers. It is a caricature of a building, freakishly scaled, with a pyramidal roof and an improbably tall single chimney which are so weightily disproportionate to the cube beneath them that they seem to have driven it into the ground. The decorative details are Flemish Renaissance, an unprecedented source in the mid-1860s. The architect Eden Nesfield, the son of one of Kew’s landscape gardeners, shared premises and was briefly in partnership with Norman Shaw. A decade later Shaw, well on the way to becoming the most famous and most prolific architect in Britain, launched on London countless red-brick buildings in this idiom. His timing was opportune. Nesfield, who must have seemed to any observer the more gifted of the two, would design a mere fraction of the buildings that his former partner achieved. There is very likely a third lesson here, about the deceptions of promise.
Four. After a day’s interacting with trees, pods, fungi — including even certain species that have become denizens and do not require the life support of the world’s most beautiful sauna — I walked to Kew Gardens station. Near by is a shop selling natural remedies, natural foods, natural this and that. Nothing red in tooth or claw there. Nothing red full stop. Britain suffers a climatically and luminously determined perception of nature as possessing a straitened palate of undramatic colours, colours which are best represented in water colour. The Royal Botanic Gardens quite counter such a perception. They teach us that nature is not drab, commonsensical, puritanical, but a tissue of artifice, disguise, polychromatic perversity, extravagence. They subvert a nationally received idea.