132 ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW 
The "chief difficulty in a house of this size, kept at so high a 
temperature, is to maintain an atmosphere sufficiently humid. No 
single condition, perhaps, in a tropical house, is of so much im- 
portance in regard to the health of the plants. It is secured by 
frequent damping of floors, stages, etc. 
The large plants in this house are in remarkably vigorous health. 
Many of them are the finest of their kind in Europe. But there is 
, always a certain antagonism between the large plants 
s ' and the small in a house of such dimensions as this. 
Plants in glass-houses almost invariably thrive best near the roof 
glass, and here, where many of the plants in the central beds are 
fifty or sixty feet away from it, it means that the conditions are ex- 
ceedingly unfavourable for them. It is a matter of considerable 
difficulty to find plants that will make a permanent undergrowth in 
this part of the house, and when such plants are found they are not 
only few in number, but often lacking in attractive qualities also. The 
system now largely relied on is to furnish these beds every spring 
with the surplus plants from other tropical houses. They succeed 
very well during the light summer months, but many, of course, 
succumb during the winter. The general visitor, however, is more 
concerned with the giants of the house and the more notable plants, 
many of which, it should be mentioned, are better seen from the 
gallery than from elsewhere. 
The palms are seen to best advantage in the centre of the house, 
where, planted in beds of soil, they attain the finest development 
Palms P oss ^le under glass. The long, straight, columnar trunks, 
marked every two or three inches with the ringed scars of 
fallen leaves, and bearing at the summit a crown of fan- or plume- 
like leaves, have a purely tropical aspect. Here is growing a specimen 
of Sabal Blackburniana, interesting as being the oldest palm in Kew. 
It was a fine specimen as long ago as 1820, and is believed to have 
been brought to Kew in 1793 by Admiral Bligh on his return from 
the famous voyage during which he succeeded in introducing 
the bread-fruit tree to the West Indies from the islands of the Pacific. 
It is a fan-leaved palm, and often bears great crops of black, grape- 
like fruit. 
There are two plants of the cocoa-nut palm, the tree which pro- 
duces the cocoa-nut of the coster’s barrow. The larger one has a 
trunk six feet high and one foot in diameter. Although so common 
