Year 8 visit Kew Gardens

Year 8 geographers enjoyed visiting Kew Gardens on 29th September

‘Plants and fungi are vital to the future of food, clean air and medicine. We’re fighting against biodiversity loss to save life on Earth’ – Kew Gardens website

Words can not even describe how beautiful Kew Gardens is. There are so many plants from the Venus flytrap to the Acanthaceae. The visit to Kew Gardens on 29th September 2022 gave Year 8 the opportunity to experience a wide range of biomes in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, the Palm House and the Temperate House. It was amazing to see how the plants had adapted to their environment because of the different climatic conditions. We saw large pointy drip tips on the leaves in the Palm House and tiny rolled up leaves as spikes on the cacti and succulents of the hot desert.

We loved walking in the canopy on the Treetop Walkway. It started to sway halfway giving us the sensation of what it would be like to be up in the canopy of the rainforest we’ve studied in lessons!

We discovered that Sir David Attenborough buried a time capsule in the foundation of the Princess of Wales Conservatory in 1985, during the glasshouse’s construction. The capsule contains seeds of important food crops and several endangered species. We will be 76 years old when the capsule is opened in 2085, when many of the plants it contains may be rare or extinct and Her Majesty The Queen visited Kew Gardens many times during her long reign; she even planted a tree there!

All the Year 8s at Bishop’s Hatfield Girls’ School enjoyed the trip very much. We loved seeing first-hand the ecosystems we had studied in lessons.

By Mia H (8Fr)