The first of May, and the hottest day of the year, coinciding with the short annual period bluebells erupt into a vibrant carpet, perhaps the perfect day to visit The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in West London. Across 132 hectares, a landscape formed from the gardens of two former palaces that bookend the site, visitors can meander through nature from across the world, sit and have picnics in the company of foxes and wildlife, and experience some of the grandest botanical greenhouses and garden architecture set pieces of any public landscape. Behind that romantic pastoral scenery, Kew is also a site of scientific research and analysis, not only exploring plant and fungal history, but also making plans for a future of climate change.

Last July, we visited one of Kew’s other sites, the vast landscape of Wakehurst, to explore how their scientific research and study of meadow lands was being considered in collaboration with artists for a series of site-responsive installations (see 00211). Kew’s dedication to culture as a form of dissemination and investigation is also present at their main site, and a new installation by experiential artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF).




Standing like a 2001 A Space Odyssey monolith, bang in the middle of one of Kew’s grand, central axis, is a giant black rectangle. It’s a digital screen with its presentation clear all the way back along the axis from the Decimus Burton-designed Palm House, central to Kew since 1848, eight years after the site was transferred from the Crown to the government and opened to the public. The huge black monolithic screen, however, portrays something even older – a Lucombe Oak tree dating from 1762.

MLF’s screen is sited where the tree once stood. In 1845, with the site being re-landscaped to suit its now public offer and iconic glasshouses, landscape designer William Nesfield relocated it a few metres to the south in order to open up the long avenue vista. Since then, on a slight mount created for its replanting, the tree has flourished, but now MLF have worked with Kew’s scientists and horticulturalists to reconsider the tree afresh, using the latest LiDAR technology to deeply capture and see the tree like never before.





A 12-minute video looping on the screen shows the Lucombe Oak through four seasons, a slow encircling pan presenting the trunk, roots, branches, and leaves in incredible details courtesy of MLF stitching together thousands of images. Working with the Kew team, they even used ground-penetrating radar to reveal the complex root system under the oak and CT scanning to examine soil samples to reveal the rich nature of the subterranean landscape.

Then, into this meticulous mapping of the tree, they added real world data to show the invisible systems of water, oxygen, and carbon working in and around the historic oak. The result is a poetic study of the rich ecosystem that surrounds and interacts with just one single tree, albeit a very large one. It is also instantly gettable, Paul Denton, the head of Visitor Programmes and Exhibitions, saying that any cultural project in the garden has to work for a range of visitors, from the scientifically knowledgeable to the curious child, and from the art-reading expert to a member of the public who is mainly there to see the nature.




The visual exploration is helped by a 3D soundscape designed by James Bulley, a regular MLF collaborator, and who for this project worked with Kew Gardens’ Tree Gang (possibly the best departmental job title to ever be added to LinkedIn) to record sounds from the tree and its surrounding nature through several microphones across its branches at different times of the year. These sounds were then worked into a score played through 10 speakers within the sculptural form and a further six embedded into the ground – visitors experiencing the sound as they walk around the work, and also feeling it bubble up from beneath. The whole installation is then interactive, visitors able to impact the motions of the Lucombe Oak by moving in front of the work, triggering motion sensors.

Being able to see the tree breath and observe its interconnection with over 2,300 species – some of which are catalogued on the reverse of the monolith, including blunt feather-moss, rock fingerwort, cobweb beetles, and brown tree ants – offers more than a decorative illustration of nature at work, it reminds of the delicate ecosystem at risk should just one tree fail to survive.



The work, and other cultural projects at Kew this season, relates to ongoing research into trees by the institution. Kew Gardens’ West London site has 11,000 of them – including a woodland that dates back to the 1600s – though many would be at risk with the rapidly changing climate. In planning the future of their sites, and through them the future of UK nature, Kew say that they must think in “tree time”, planning for decades ahead. As part of this Kew’s scientists and Tree Gang regularly head out to nations who currently have climates and natural systems that align with what is expected in the UK later this century. Recent trips to Romania and Serbia have helped analysis of what might help future resilience of species to survive in the UK.

If the future of the UK’s survival is literally rooted in migration, cross-cultural collaboration, and learning from our neighbours, so is its past. The Lucombe Oak itself is testament to this, a reason that it has survived over 250 years, including its displacement, is that it was grown from an accidental hybrid of a Turkey oak and Cork oak from a nursery outside Exeter in the 1760s. By chance, this cross-identity created the conditions perfect to survive over a thousand English seasons since – four of which are presented in Marshmallow Laser Feast’s looping, deep study.