The London winter can make even the spectacular grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew—home to one of the world’s biggest and most diverse botanical collections—look bleak, so its very refreshing to step into its Princess of Wales Conservatory, awash with colour, as the gardens hold their annual orchid festival. The festival has been running for 22 years now—deliberately held at the height of winter to provide relief from the grey skies outside—and has been used to highlight orchids from across the world.
Orchids are, it turns out, the largest family of flowering plants with 25,000 known species across the world, from the tropics to sub-polar regions, providing the team at Kew with great opportunities to showcase different species. Last year, Kew focused on orchids native to Brazil while this year they’ve turned to India, joining many British institutions in marking the U.K.-India Year of Culture.
Orchids, explains Nick Johnson, the manager of glass houses at Kew and the creator of the festival, though so diverse are remarkably specific to regions. “Some will live just in a deep dark valley, 300 metres wide, or will require a specific kind of tree trunk.”
The right environs
Their specificity makes them particularly fragile, and the work of Johnson and his team particularly tricky: around 1,600 man-hours have gone into creating the displays, which feature around 3,600 orchids, mainly native to India. They’ve gone to great lengths providing the right environ for the orchids, including the building of a giant cement tree branch, for epiphyte orchids that grow on trees. The massive glasshouse has different climate zones, which gives plenty of scope for a huge variety to be displayed.
Bala Kompalli, an Indian botanical horticulturist, oversees some 10,000 species of orchids at Kew.
Phalaenopsis, or moth orchids, and dendrodiums (found in the Himalayas) constitute the bulk of the displays, and feature in spectacular pieces such as the giant ‘Samsara’ cone, a three-metre-high whirl of white and orange in the middle of the greenhouse’s pond, and in chandelier-like arrangements of pink and yellow orchids from the ceiling.
They’ve also taken on other ambitious pieces such as a moss-peacock with a tail-feather purely of orchids, a rickshaw filled with orchids, and a section with Vandas, colourful orchids with long wispy roots that grow on trees, hanging like fragile lanterns from the ceiling. The Vandas, native to the Himalayas, originate from a variety of Blue Vanda that were so popular in Victorian Britain of the 19th century that each plant could fetch the equivalent of £15,000 in current valuation, says Johnson.
Kew has built up a wealth of orchid knowledge with around 4,00,000 preserved specimens, in the world’s largest orchid herbarium. Some of the orchids come from their own collection, though those in the displays come from across Europe, and Holland in particular. (With strict regulations governing the import of plants to protect biodiversity, orchids reared elsewhere would have to spend months in quarantine.)
Bala Kompalli, an Indian botanical horticulturist who oversees some 10,000 species of orchids at Kew, works on conservation projects with organisations such as the Botanical Survey of India and the Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden & Research Institute.
She’s recently been working with India-based conservationists on the Coelogyne cristata, an epiphytic orchid with fragile white flowers. “The festival gives us a chance to talk about conservation and look after the habitat where orchids are found,” says Johnson.
The festival seeks to give a flavour of Indian botanical life beyond orchids too, in a colourful way: there’s a large Indian flag made entirely out of chrysanthemums, and a village “street scene”. There will also be electric violin performances by London-based musician and composer Jyotsna Srikanth, as well as Indian cooking masterclasses by author Monisha Bharadwaj.
For those seeking to delve deeper, there are behind-the-scenes tours, including to the orchid nursery, and talks on the history and diversity of Indian orchids, the Vanda orchids of Sikkim, and how the elaborate displays were put together.
Johnson says he was especially excited to tell the story of Indian orchids, which have not typically been associated with the country. “Orchids are a thing of wild India,” he says. “To see them you have to get away from the cities and towns and see them in their natural habitat… Its much easier to see marigolds whereas the biodiversity of India is in the wilds where people don’t go.”
On show: Till March 5, at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew, South West London
