Tropical House, Ventnor Botanic Garden

Ventnor Botanic Garden occupies the site of the Royal National Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, opened in 1869 as the National Cottage Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest, whose 130 bedrooms all faced south. Made redundant by drug treatments for tuberculosis, the hospital closed in 1964 and was demolished in 1969. In 1970 the nurseryman Sir Harold Hillier founded a botanic garden on the land and gave it to the Isle of Wight Council.

The large Tropical House was built in 1986 and opened in 1987. Some fifteen years later its polycarbonate panels had degraded, and in summer 2002 the garden decided to re-landscape and replant the house entirely around a bold contemporary theme, combining environmental issues linked to industrial extraction. The garden kept growing: a Palm Garden opened in 2005, management passed in 2012 from the council to Ventnor Botanic Garden CIC, and in 2021 its palm collection was awarded National Plant Collection status.

The glasshouse was designed to recall the curvilinear conservatories of the Victorian era, but in the materials of its own day: its skin was made of polycarbonate panels, which deteriorated over about fifteen years. The 2002 redesign turned the interior into a piece of theatre. Visitors arrive through The Hub, whose interpretation walls set the scene, and then through a derelict mineshaft that opens into humid tropical heat.

A waterfall cascades from overhead and, with the circulating water, keeps the air saturated; plants snake up and around rusting abandoned industrial machinery. A canal runs beside the boardwalk, and the main pool holds twenty-two tonnes of water kept at 28°C.

The star of the house is the giant water lily Victoria amazonica, raised every year from seed as an annual. In four months a pea-sized seed becomes a plant nearly three metres across, with leaves able to bear the weight of a child. Each flower opens on only two nights: white on the first, to draw in scarab beetle pollinators, and pink on the second, once the beetle has been released. Egyptian blue lotus surrounds it in summer.

The house also grows the Brazilian Dutchman's pipe, Aristolochia gigantea, a climber with large foul-smelling summer flowers, along with plants showing drip-tip leaves and red undersides, while fish swim in the canal.

The Tropical House stands in Ventnor Botanic Garden on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, and is reached through The Hub. Summer is the best season: the giant water lily is then at full size, its flowers open at dusk and the Dutchman's pipe is in bloom. The visit continues outdoors, notably in the Palm Garden opened in 2005 around the National Collection of palms, which benefits from the sheltered climate of this stretch of coast. The garden as a whole, created by Sir Harold Hillier in 1970, occupies the site of the former Victorian chest hospital.