Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world. Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park in Middlesex, England, its living collections includes some of the 27,000 plants curated by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the herbarium, which is one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London’s top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.
There are numerous different ‘Houses’ at Kew, all devoted to different types of plants from around the world
These images are of the Temperate House. The lower image was shot with a vwery wide-angle, fisheye lens hence the ‘Barrel Distortion’.
In the first image it is possible to see a high-flying airliner’s condensation trail. In the couple of minutes interval between these two images it is interesting to note what the strong upper stratosphere’s wind has done to distort the trail.
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