Palm House set for major renovation

This is a large scale a change – this includes transfer of 1,300 plants, space of 16,000 pan of glass and hundreds of tons of iron.

It is an ambitious £ 50 meter plan to renew the world famous Palm House, which sits in the heart of the Royal Botanic Garden Kev.

The hot and humid conditions inside have taken their toll on the building, which was opened in 1848 and is home to a tropical rainfall.

Cave will also use renewal – which will see the glass house closed for 2027 to five years – to reduce emissions up to the net zero from Palm House.

Permission for planning for the project is now presented, and some plants that make indoor tropical rainforests have started transferring them.

“This is probably the plant that I worry about moving the most,” says Thomas Pickering, the head of the glasshouse.

He stands next to one of the most precious samples of the kev: a plant called BrainWhich is a type of cycad.

It is growing in a vessel, and at the age of 250, it is older than the Palm House. It is also very large – weighing more than a ton and standing about 4 meters long.

“This is its sheer shape. It has a huge weight in that root ball, but it is also incredibly long stem, which is very old because they are incredibly growing slow growing plants,” says pickering.

Horticulture experts will use scaffolds, support and braces to protect the plant when it comes to the time to move. Other plants, which are slightly easy to shift, have already been moved to a temporary greenhouse.

“It’s going to be a long -term project,” Pikringing explains.

“And in the next two years, it is a process of choosing which plants we need to contain (place in the pot) and keep, which we need to propagate – and some plants will also fall as we will not be able to move them.”

The Palm House was built over 175 years ago and was a surprise of the Victorian era.

No one had built a glass house on that scale before and the engineers borrowed technology from the shipping industry to construct a huge structure.

It was last rebuilt in the 1980s, but now the iron places are having a heavy rust, so it will be withdrawn in bare metal work, repaired and re -painted.

All thousands of glass glazed pans will be replaced and testing to find the best type of glass to provide maximum insulation.

Maintaining the temperature of the Palm House on 21C uses too much energy, but now the gas boiler will be replaced with air source and water source heat pump.

“This is an incredibly challenging building to create a net zero,” said Rachel Pardan, the leading stability in the Kev.

“We can do a large quantity with things like improving the heating system to improve the stability of the Palm House without sealing the glass and reduce the carbon footprint and impress the aesthetics.”

The Water Lily House, which is located next to the Palm House, will also be built as part of the renewal. The public will still be able to visit both for the next two years, before they are closed for tasks.

Kev’s team admitted that it would be a major venture that would have a temporary impact on the people coming to their botanical garden. But they say that the results will be worth it.

Rachel Pardon says, “The actually important aspect of this is to try and ensure that the structure may last as long as possible, before we have to renew another.”