Kew honours Sir David Attenborough as he turns 100

Staff from Kew record a birthday message for Sir David Attenborough

Sir David Attenborough turns 100 on Friday 8 May, and across the river at Kew Gardens they’re getting ready to mark the day

The naturalist has lived in Richmond since 1951, and has called it his ‘favourite place on earth’. Kew has been part of his life for nearly as long.

He visited as a young man for the peace and quiet of the gardens, served as a Kew Trustee from 1986 to 1992, and reopened the restored Temperate House in May 2018, calling it ‘a breathtakingly beautiful space’.

Temperate House reopening in 2018

To mark his centenary, 100 staff and volunteers from Kew Gardens, Wakehurst and the conservation centre in Madagascar gathered in front of the Palm House to record a birthday message.

Kew’s Director, Richard Deverell, said Sir David’s storytelling had inspired millions to value the natural world, and that his work ‘underscores the urgency of Kew’s mission to document, conserve and protect the world’s plant and fungal diversity’.

In 2005 Sir David planted the gardens’ first Wollemi Pine, a tree thought to have been extinct for two million years until a small population was found in Australia’s Blue Mountains in 1994; fewer than 100 wild specimens are known to survive.

In 2023 he donated a collection of seeds from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to be cultivated in Kew’s tropical nurseries.

Last year, a research team including Kew scientists named a newly discovered parasitic fungus after him.

Gibellula attenboroughii, found in Irish caves, infects orb-weaving spiders, hijacks their behaviour and forces them into exposed positions to spread spores before killing them. Honour does not get more peculiar than that.

Of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst, which marked its 25th anniversary last year, Sir David has said it is ‘perhaps the most significant conservation initiative ever’.

The BBC will broadcast ‘David Attenborough’s 100 Years on Planet Earth’ from the Royal Albert Hall on the evening of his birthday, hosted by Kirsty Young, with the BBC Concert Orchestra performing music from his programmes.

Kew is asking the public to mark the day in their own way, by spending more time in nature, planting native trees, supporting conservation projects or simply visiting a green space.

Chiswick Calendar readers may know that the wider Attenborough family has its own ties to the area.

Sir David’s nephew, theatre director Michael Attenborough, lives in Chiswick and curated a centenary retrospective for his late father Richard, David’s brother, at Chiswick Cinema in 2023.

READ ALSO: Sir Ben Kingsley, Geraldine James & Dame Penelope Wilton mark Richard Attenborough centenary in Chiswick

All pictures provided by Kew Gardens