Palm House, Kew Gardens in the context of "Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew"

Decimus Burton (30 September 1800 – 14 December 1881) was one of the foremost English architects and landscapers of the 19th century. He was the foremost Victorian architect in the Roman Revival, Greek Revival, Georgian neoclassical and Regency styles. He was a founding fellow and vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and from 1840 architect to the Royal Botanic Society, and an early member of the Athenaeum Club, London, whose clubhouse he designed and which the company of his father, James Burton, the pre-eminent Georgian London property developer, built.

Burton's works are Hyde Park, London (including the gate or screen of Hyde Park Corner, the Wellington Arch, and the Gates); Green Park and St James's Park; Regent's Park (including Cornwall Terrace, York Terrace, Clarence Terrace, Chester Terrace, and the villas of the Inner Circle which include his own mansion, The Holme, and the original Winfield House); the enclosure of the forecourt of Buckingham Palace from which he had Nash's Marble Arch moved; the clubhouse of the Athenaeum Club, London; Carlton House Terrace; Spring Gardens in St. James's; and the Palm House and the Temperate House at Kew Gardens. Burton designed the seaside towns of St Leonards-on-Sea, Fleetwood, and Folkestone, and also Royal Tunbridge Wells. His Calverley Estate (of which only a small proportion survives) was highly commended.

Palm house is a term sometimes used for large and high heated display greenhouses that specialise in growing palms and other tropical and subtropical plants. In Victorian Britain, several ornate glass and iron palm houses were built in botanical gardens and parks, using cast iron architecture. Especially in English-speaking countries outside the British Isles, these are often called conservatories, in the UK mainly a term for small glass structures attached to houses.

The large example, completed in 1848, in Kew Gardens, London was arguably the first greenhouse to be built on this scale. It was also the first large-scale structural use of wrought iron. The later Temperate House at Kew is in fact even larger. Other British examples are at Liverpool's Sefton Park and Stanley Park. Elsewhere there are the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio, the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken in Brussels, the Palmenhaus Schönbrunn in Vienna, and many others.