Monday's gardens

My third day in south London, and as all my friends (or the ones in the vicinity) were working I had to entertain myself. But first I had to transport myself. It was a fairly short trip involving 2 trains and a bus. But I had brushed up my London transport skills over the previous few days and was feeling confident. I think that looking confident (whether or not you feel it) is an important factor in avoiding pick-pockets. One unfortunate lady immediately made herself vulnerable as she failed to "mind the gap" and lost a shoe down said gap whilst boarding the train. Her husband seemed to want to try to reclaim the shoe but she wanted to buy some new ones. I'm sure they ultimately went for the wise option in not delving around under the train (although it does seem a rather extreme way of getting a new pair of shoes), but they made themselves very conspicuous.

Anyway, I duly arrived at Kew Gardens. My first impression was that there were a lot of coach parties of:

1.    School children

2.    Foreign tourists

I was a bit concerned that I would get caught up with these. In actual fact I managed to mostly avoid them, with the exception of some probably year 7s drawing pineapples in the lily house.

A pineapple

A lily

After my quick trip to the lily house I think I mostly avoided the parties by avoiding the most popular attractions in the first part of the day. With the assistance of the excellent touristical map (including both a north marker and a scale) I headed off in the direction of the Mediterranean garden. It smelt wonderful and I spotted a few things that I thought might be possibles for our front garden: Genistra tinctoria, Santolina chamaecyparissus and Cistus laurifolius.

Santolina chamaecyparissus

Cistus laurifolius

It was one of those days that whatever you’re wearing it’s not quite right for the weather. I had opted for trousers and a thin jumper but when the sun came out this was too hot. But if I’d gone for something lighter I would have been too cold. Even now it was slightly cool when the sun wasn’t blaring down. So in what looked like it might be a prolonged period of cloudiness (it wasn’t the sun came back really quickly) I went into the temperate greenhouse. In the sun I would say that it was actually rather hotter than temperate. The greenhouse is due to close next month for significant preservation work and I found my walk around interesting from the point of view of preparations for this – various demarcations in bright paint and the removal of various plants to a secure part of the greenhouse. You can see why this building is grade 1 listed; architecturally I found it quite beautiful. The best plant was a caper.

Caper plant

Temperate greenhouse

Tree-top walkway
(from the ground)

Since I last visited Kew (which must have been at least 10 years ago on a really hot day) they have installed a treetop walkway. Here I did run into a small group of school children who were mainly interested in walking the “wrong” way around the walkway and seeing how much they could make it wobble. It being the summer the view from the walkway was not really that interesting – consisting mostly of green leaves. I imagine it would be beautiful in the autumn. I does realise just how high these trees are – 108 steps.

I stopped for lunch by a pond. This seemed to be a nice spot where I could watch some moorhens (or maybe coots – I can never remember which ones have the white beaks) make their nests and there were plenty of benches. I could hear a peacock so my picnic was slightly impeded by my concerns that it would want to coming after my food (this happened at the zoo once). I needn’t have worried. I should have put my energy into worrying about the ducks who were much more interested and actually required me to vacate my bench for fear of picnic nick-age.

My highlights of the afternoon were:

1. The stag beetle loggery – stag beetles are one of my favourite childhood insects. Sadly I didn’t see any today.

2. Ice-cream – I had a little mid-afternoon break to make up for my duck-shortened lunch. I love ice-cream and this did not disappoint: coffee + honey and walnut.

3. The gravel garden – this gave me yet more inspiration for our front garden. I am definitely going to try some Salvia X Silvestris ‘Mainacht’ – it was really popular with the bees.

4. Roses – I love smelling them. Today I particularly loved smelling the orangey-yellow ones which have got a lovely sort of sherbet-citrus aroma like ‘Lady of Shallot’ and ‘Lady Emma Hamilton’. It made me wonder about what the different chemical composition of the various rose smells is, and whether a friendly analytical chemist could help me out with this conundrum.

Lady of Shallot

Ice-cream break

Salvia X Silvestris ‘Mainacht’

By 5.30pm I had seen most of what I had wanted to see. There was still an hour before closing time and when I was due to meet my friends for tea so I redeployed my touristical map and headed off for the one major attraction that I had missed: the compost heap. Unfortunately what the touristical map doesn’t tell you is that the compost heap is out-of bounds to the general public so I had to make do with a distant view and a poor quality photo. Oh well.

The compost heap from a distance