Statuesque, apparently well fed and a brilliant shade of jade green with flamboyant turquoise flashes on his substantial, if scaly, jowls, Lord Blechnum, a Chinese water dragon, isn’t the first character you’d expect to encounter in a glasshouse. One of eight such reptiles to have been employed in the Princess of Wales Conservatory at RBG Kew (kew.org), his mission has been innovative but singular: to keep the cockroaches under control.
“It’s not just Kew that has cockroaches,” says Fiona Inches, glasshouse manager on secondment to the Edinburgh Biomes Project at RBGE (rbge.org.uk). “If you have tropical glasshouses, I would be very surprised if you didn’t have cockroaches. They’re all living in the heating ducts here,” she notes wryly, hinting that the artisans currently working on the glasshouses’ substantial, seven-year-long restoration project will soon encounter a small horror.
For better or for worse, the cockroaches are somewhat heraldic of these august buildings. They represent a
