CHAPTER VI 
THE TEMPERATE HOUSE 
In many respects the most interesting and most beautiful vegetation 
on the globe is found in climates warmer than that of Great Britain, 
but cooler than that of the tropics. It is the vegetation of South 
Europe and Asia Minor ; of the warmer parts of China and Japan • 
of North and South Africa ; of Southern Australia, New Zealand, and 
Tasmania ; of the Southern United States and Mexico ; of the warmer 
parts of Chile ; and of the middle elevations of the Himalaya, the 
Andes, and all high mountains of the tropics. Within these areas 
grow many of the fruits and flowers most cherished by mankind ; 
the grape, the orange, the lemon and all its tribe, the fig, the pome- 
granate, olive, and myrtle. It is the vegetation of these regions which 
the Temperate House at Kew is intended to represent and to illustrate. 
The building, designed, like the Palm House, by Mr. Decimus 
Burton, is strikingly different from that structure in its general out- 
^ pj lines. In contrast to the soft curves of the tropical 
Its Size ' k° use ’ ^ nes Temperate House are rigidly 
and Cost formal. It consists of three sections — a large central 
block with north and south wings. Each wing is con- 
nected to the central part by an eight-sided structure fifty feet in 
diameter. The middle block (here alluded to as the Winter Garden) 
covers a rectangle 216 feet long by 140 feet wide. The apex of the 
roof is 60 feet from the ground. Both it and the octagons were 
built by Messrs. Cubitt. They were completed in 1862, at an 
approximate cost of £29,000. Although the terrace on which the 
whole building stands had been made (the material was taken 
from the site of the present Lake) and some of the foundations 
for the wings laid, further progress with the work was indefinitely 
postponed, and for more than thirty years nothing more was done. 
In 1894, however, owing largely to the influence and advocacy of 
Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, 
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