The beginning was some 23,000 years ago when an advancing glacier stopped at the place we now call Kew Gardens. As the glacier melted, the water ran down to the Atlantic Ocean creating the flat land on which Richmond Hill and other communities to the south were built. The boulders and earth the glacier carried here remained in the form of a hilly ridge that geologists call a "terminal moraine". It was on this moraine that Kew Gardens would be built.