Tiptoe through the treetops on Kew's leafy walkway

Kew Gardens has unveiled a multimillion pound walkway which allows visitors to stroll through the treetops of some of the garden's oldest and most spectacular trees at a vertigo-inducing height of nearly 60ft.

The Xstrata Treetop Walkway opens to the public tomorrow and will enable up to 3,000 visitors to experience panoramic views of west London as they pass through a circular 200m route which winds its way through a canopy of sweet chestnuts, limes and deciduous oaks.

The steel structure, built by Marks Barfield, the architecture firm that designed the London Eye, is an attempt to enable visitors to get up close to the various ecosystems that thrive in the canopies of Britain's trees.

Woodpeckers, squirrels, bats and a myriad of insects all live in the trees where the walkway has been built. Between July and August it will also be possible to catch a glimpse of the purple hairstreak butterfly, Neozephyrus quercus, which is rarely seen from the ground as it spends its life in the highest branches of oak trees. The walkway cost nearly £4m to construct and required 500 tonnes of specially designed "weathered steel" which features a light dusting of rust that helps the metal walkway blend in with the natural environment.

The designers also used the Fibonacci Code, a 12th century mathematical sequence that lies at the heart of the growth of many plant structures, to decide where to put the metal slats holding the walkway together in order to make the structure look more in tune with the surrounding branches.

Tony Kirkham, head of Kew's arboretum, said the walkway was particularly designed to appeal to children. "When you go up into a tree's canopy you experience something totally unique," he said. "It is our children who are the future custodians of our planet and they need to understand why we must save the world's trees."