Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens

TODAY was my favorite day so far! It was a very early wake up and the journey was longer than normal (a tube as well as an actual train), but it it was worth all of it because we went to Kew, the Royal Botanic Gardens. (Kew is pronounced like the letter "Q")

Kew was founded in 1759 as a royal garden owned by George II. A running theme I have already noticed here is Britain making choices to better themselves, which is no surprise. The Royal Garden expanded and people went around the world looking for plants to bring back and plant there. The idea behind it was to find out what plants could be used and sold, how to profit from them, and ultimately make the United Kingdom the most successful.

Some of you might be wondering how gardens and flowers relate to library and information science. Well let me tell you--they have a pretty epic library, art, & archives section. The library is 165 years old. It has over 7 million sheets of paper in archives as well as many, many plants. It has a herbarium, which is a library of dried plant specimens in order to provide collection-based research opportunities. There are over 7 million samples in it! In this modern period now, the goal is to show how the collections complement each other in unique and special ways.

Fiona Ainsworth spoke with us today--she is the Head of Library, Art & Archives. A big thank you to her for showing us her collection.

I learned that, to document plants appropriately, all features of the plant must be shown for it to be helpful. This means seeds, roots, flowers, etc. That is why plants are typically drawn and not photographed, because not all of the features appear at the same time to photograph at once.

1485 Mandrake Drawing

Did you know mandrakes were more than just magical screaming plants in Harry Potter? I didn't! They exist in real life, and they are poisonous. Apparently the roots look very suggestive, (aka like male genitalia), and that is how the plant started to get drawn with the roots as a man.

The book featured above is from 1485 and is the second oldest handwritten item in the collection at Kew. Wow!

Here are a couple other cool snippets from the tour:

This diagram is damaged--it was folded and has now torn and has signs of fading and discoloration. I still think it was my favorite diagram from the day.

Letters written by Charles Darwin to John Henslow while on the Beagle. In them, he confides his theories on evolution. He struggled with it because he himself was very religious. Henslow encouraged him because there was science behind his theories to back them up.

This is Charles Darwin's (terrible) handwriting!!!! The writing is all over because it was typical, in order to save paper, to write down the page one way and then turn it 90 degrees and keep writing. From these letters we learn that Darwin was seasick often on the Beagle, which really puts a very humanizing perspective on him.

This is a hand-drawn sketch of an orchid by Darwin. It is very, very rare--Darwin drew very infrequently.

There is more than meets the eye for this cute little elephant portrait. But no one would know that, if not for another piece of the collection--a book called Recollections of a Happy Life by Marianne North. In it, she mentions an elephant who was best friends with a goat for years. The elephant wouldn't let anyone come near the goat or the goat's kids, and they loved hanging out all the time. This is a perfect example of the various collections supporting each other.

Something that totally blew my mind about Kew--virtually all of there collections are uncataloged. There is no way for users to come in and search for things really. They must discuss with librarians and those who know the collection to get help finding anything, or to even know what is there. And this isn't for lack of trying. There is no funding for Kew to catalog everything. This is pretty mind-blowing to me--cataloging is pretty darn important in the library and information world, and no one wants to pay for it even for The Royal Botanic Library! In my humble, new-to-the-career opinion, this is pretty disgraceful for the world we live in. Cataloging the information we have is the very, very first step to growing or learning anything new.

But enough of that--after the tour, we got to go out and explore the Royal Botanic Garden. And it. Was. AMAZING!