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One of the world’s most famous greenhouses needs renovations, but it won’t be easy. How can its tropical tenants move without dying in the process? We’ll dive in today.

First, let’s catch you up on other news.

1. Policy: Quebec puts the brakes on emissions targets, citing threats to jobs and economy
2. Wildlife: Dear birdwatchers, it’s ‘leave the owls alone’ season
3. Olympics: Stelvio is a terrifying ski course – icy, fast and steep. Here’s how the Italian slope will keep Olympic racers on their toes
4. Conservation: B.C. shelves Indigenous heritage conservation measures after strong political backlash
5. Mining: B.C. Premier basks in mining expansions as sector proves to be important ally for NDP government
6. Energy: Alberta moves ahead with direct bitumen sales plan

For this week’s deeper dive, a closer look at London’s Kew greenhouse, which is forcing its residents to make like trees and leave.

A 177-year-old glass and wrought-iron Palm House is the centrepiece of London’s Kew Gardens, where feature writer Ian Brown paid a visit for a story about a massive renovation under way.

The Palm House is one of the largest and most popular curated collections of tropical plants anywhere in the world, he writes. It’s made up of 1,300 plants and 935 species in the glass house alone, a third of which are threatened, not to mention the living botanical record of the British Empire’s rise and fall.

But the renovation is more than just updating the building, which is a feat itself, especially since the goal is to transform the Victorian relic into the prototype of the world’s first carbon-neutral glass conservatory. To do this, they will strip and clean and repaint and refurbish – replacing the complicated heating and watering colonics and its 16,000 panes of glass.

But then there’s the plants.

You first have to move all the vegetation, including the ones that are more than eight metres tall. But very few of the rare and valuable tropical plants in the glass house can survive outside, even in England’s mild-but-getting-hotter climate. So they will need to be relocated into warm, moist temporary quarters known as “decant houses.”

On top of that, they will need to grow backups, in case the transplants don’t take.

All that will take five years.

Will Spoelstra, the Palm House’s supervisor, has worked at Kew for more than a decade, and has been planning the logistics of the renovation for several years. But the physical transfer of the plants began only last fall.

The palms you can only really propagate from seed. Several species are impossible to move because they are upholstered in piercing spines. Cycads for example – the most common plant on the planet back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth – are not a plant you want to accidentally kill.

The plants represent other histories. The building’s most famous residents are 175 species of palm that inspired centuries of exploitation as well as the Western world’s obsession with everything warm and exotic.

If it all goes as planned, Ian writes, the Palm House will transform from a monument to the glory of imperialism and empire, into a practical example of what we can do to reverse the effects of our careless ambition – an international call to climate-change action.

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