At the furthest end of the 320 acres of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew — beyond the glasshouses and even the arboretum — is a bluebell wood. This traditionally managed, historic woodland has a genuinely rural atmosphere that becomes quite magical during the great sensory crescendo that is a bluebell wood in full bloom.
The wood is part of a not particularly well-known 37-acre natural area that also includes meadows and wetland. Its unassuming nature is due to an unlikely conservationist — Queen Victoria. Like her forebears, she was a great supporter of the gardens and, as her grandparents, George III and Queen Charlotte, were, she was particularly charmed by the informal ‘wilderness’ along the River Thames from Kew Palace.
Rarely used by the Royal Family after Queen Charlotte’s death, the area was left in a somewhat natural state, with ivy and bramble allowed to romp, and fallen trees abandoned in the undergrowth. For her Diamond Jubilee, Victoria decided to give the royal wilderness to the nation with one proviso, ‘that this unique spot may be preserved in its present beautiful and natural condition’.
Attached to Kew’s natural area is the garden around Queen Charlotte’s Cottage, a rustic building that she had made with half-timbered exterior walls and antique leaded windows.
A small clump of the invasive Rhododendron ponticum has been left by Queen Charlotte’s Cottage for old times’ sake.
Inside, there was no kitchen or bedroom, but enough space to prepare tea, with a tiny privy behind a baize door. The ‘picnic room’ was painted by her daughter Princess Elizabeth to resemble the inside of a bower, its parabolic ceiling criss-crossed with a trompe-l’oeil bamboo trellis, adorned with nasturtium and morning glory. Outside, a menagerie of exotic animals kept the Royal Family amused until the kangaroos became too numerous. The garden was then planted with Rhododendron ponticum, introduced into England in 1763.
The picnic room in Queen Charlotte’s cottage showing the trompe-l’oeil trellis, which is said to have been painted by her daughter, the Princess Elizabeth.
A detail of the delicate trellis showing a nasturtium flower and cabbage white butterfly.
There are many interpretations of how to manage a landscape in a natural condition and one of them is to do nothing. By 2024, the cottage’s garden featured mainly 20ft rhododendrons, with a supporting chorus of bramble. Although the cottage was restored by Historic Royal Palaces in 2021, it remained mainly hidden from view when Kew’s arboretum team, led by Valerie Boujard, began its own restoration a couple of years ago.
Ms Boujard has the challenging remit of drawing in visitors without putting in obvious new attractions, unless one counts native shrubs, such as elder, serviceberry and spindle, in this category. One of the first jobs was to tackle the Rhododendron ponticum. Much has gone, but an island of the plant, cut to waist height, has been left for old times’ sake, and a few full-height remnants are allowed to express themselves further back.
Nothing has gone to waste: their twisted stems are useful in a sculptural woodpile in the ‘habitat bed’. Another survivor is a rangy, unpruned Buxus sempervirens, contemporary to the 1772 cottage, which is a magnet for bees when in flower.
Instead of being removed, non-native hardwoods are ring-barked to encourage decline.
In choosing new plants for the cottage’s garden, the plan has been to select natives, ‘because we are neighbours with the natural area,’ explains Ms Boujard. An easy win was to add more Betula pendula to make a birch grove with a few old survivors. Seen through their pale stems, the cottage beckons, like the setting for a northern European folk tale. In April, the woodland-edge garden is awash with bluebells and more Hyacinthoides non-scripta, gathered from other areas, have been planted to form a bluebell ‘river’ in the cleared space. It’s an unrushed process, with foxgloves, campions and daffodils added by seed and the garden monitored for insect activity.
Kew’s scientific expertise is an advantage when it comes to interpreting a ‘natural’ land-scape for our times and the future. Adding more native trees involves some consideration; it is no good looking to old reliables such as English oak or beech because they are now struggling when spring is increasingly dry and summer is unusually hot. Kevin Martin, the head of tree collections, has been monitoring Quercus robur grown from acorns collected from as far east as Kazakhstan and south to the Caucasus where they grow in conditions that might be similar to ours in the future.
Ru Brookes is Kew’s natural habitats supervisor, not a job title that would have existed in Victoria’s time or even a decade ago. Of the natural area she says: ‘It’s a managed landscape, but we try to make it look as if there’s no human intervention.’ Preventing disease and keeping invasive plants in check is one goal; boosting native populations is another. A community of ageing black poplars has been given a future thanks to the efforts of Kew and other conservationists in Richmond upon Thames. Using cuttings from the genetically diverse wild population, the team is gradually replacing the old poplars on the riverbank.
Non-native trees, such as Turkey oak (Quercus cerris), are considered less useful to the ecosystems that have evolved in the British Isles with trees such as English and Welsh oak (Q. robur and Q. petraea). Instead of being removed, they are killed slowly, following the adage that a dead tree has more life in it than a living one. Bats, fungi and many rare inverte-brates thrive in wood that is decaying or dead. ‘Beetles need a lot of wood, buried timber, old root systems,’ says Ms Brookes, whose parti-cular focus is on stag beetles, which thrive in this area when generally they are endangered. The effect of senescence provides its own kind of theatre: ‘Seeing wildlife using the dead wood definitely helps people get on board.’
Non-native hardwoods are veteranised, in which members of the ‘tree gang’ rip off branches to mimic storm damage. Further options are ring barking to speed things up, and monolithing (particularly for beech) to create a branchless stem. Standing in the landscape like a lightning-struck specimen in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, the tortured trees attract owls and green woodpeckers are a common sight in the wood-fringed grasslands. The natural area’s bird population is ‘high density’ and 40 bird boxes have had their entrances reinforced to keep out parakeets. The grassy planting of a woodland-edge landscape is visually forgiving.
Although bluebells in gardens can be considered thuggish by gardeners, they are part of a succession of spring flowers that includes wild garlic, wild daffodils and snowdrops.
The latter are not native, but they are not invasive either and pro-vide early nectar. ‘A lot of insects are emerging earlier because temperatures are warmer, so we’re keen to have plants in flower anytime,’ notes Ms Brookes. After the spring pageant, unshowy wildflowers such as Stellaria media are valued in the emerging carpet of groundcover, which is essential for caterpillars.
Even brambles have their place and are cut back cyclically. ‘We encourage it because the flowers are good for pollinators and the fruit is good for pretty much everything.’
When the natural area was ceded by Queen Victoria for public enjoyment, it was described by the director of Kew as ‘a great sylvan beauty’. What would Victoria make of it now? Ms Brookes says: ‘I like to think she’d enjoy the way we’re keeping an equilibrium and trying to foster diversity in the natural environment.’ Choosing different words perhaps, it seems likely that she would concur.
Find out more about the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
This feature originally appeared in the April 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.