Welcome to getting curious. I'm Jonathan Vanes and every week I sit down for a 40 minute conversation

with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious. On today's episode,

I'm joined by Botanist and research leader at the Royal

Botanic Gardens Q, Dr. Alex Monroe, where I ask him how do you plans get

their freak off? gone.

Welcome to getting curious, this is Jonathan Venice. We are with Dr. Alex Monroe, who is a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens. So picture it. We're kind of in London right? Yeah on the edge of London on the edge of London and On the edge of London. And we are at Q Gardens, which is...

It's the world's biggest botanical gardens and botanical research institute.

So it combines an actual park-like landscape with amazing collections of living plants and then a giant collection of dried herbarium plants which, for example, I study on.

I think I just saw a tree that was from 1775. Yeah, yeah you would have yeah. That is whale. That's like that was like the Boston Tea Party in the Battle of Bunker Hill not to bring up a source

subject in the United Kingdom, you know, but I think that was like the same year.

Yeah, yeah, probably, yeah.

Like a wow, that's old.

Kew Gardens has really been like a living breathing museum for plants where people can come view them.

You can see these big beautiful glass houses.

They have like palm trees and I also saw this like one glass house place that

it like mimics like high altitude. Oh yeah yeah the palm the alpine house

that's amazing. What's the deal with that? How do you know why how why does it mimic a high

altitude? Yeah because they have to generate cold

air in the summer because it's kind of too hot in the summer for it to be alpine and

in the spring they like to kind of get some of the early warmth that they can kind of

sort of the they can have the plants flowering so it's a really

nice greenhouse because they bring plants in when they come into flowers it's

...