At this moment there are a couple of ladies, one in her sixties, one in her eighties, walking through a greenhouse, their silver heads surrounded by hanging orchids in oranges, scarlets and lavender-tinged whites. These ladies, orchid-fancying mother and daughter, are bound to be there, because they were there in every garden visited during the writing of this feature. They are the embodiment of the botanical garden as popularly imagined: cosy, slightly old-fashioned, detail-oriented, perhaps a touch eccentric. But these greying dryads do not tell the whole story. Tucked behind the palmhouses of the worlds larger gardens are buildings filled with industrial wheeled shelves for mounted plant specimens, scientists sitting round-shouldered over microscopes, and growth chambers housing rows and rows of seedlings.
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