Friday 8 October 2021

Kew Gardens in the daytime

We have tickets for Kew Gardens and it opens at 10am. We arrived at the Lion Gate Entrance at 9.52am and wait impatiently for it to open. 

They are having a Japanese festival and we went straight to one of the biggest glass houses to see the beautiful plants, and a giant artwork called One Thousand Springs. It is made of 5,000 red threads hung from the ceiling and 1,000 paper notes covered in Japanese writing celebrating the Autumn season.


We then went to the Treetop Walkway which has been closed on our previous visits. I wasn't expecting it to be very high, but actually it was enormous.


We climbed the stairs right to the top of the trees and were transported to another world. Lots of the trees were sweet chestnut trees and green parakeets were flying from branch to branch and just helping themselves to the nuts.


We were then joined in paradise by what sounded like 1,000 screaming overexcited school kids and their exhausted teacher, but on closer inspection there was only actually about 30 of them.

We made a quick getaway before we were surrounded and trampled under foot.


We carried on around the garden ooing and aahing at the lovely plants, before making another new find - the Marianne North Gallery. Miss North was a great Victorian artist and traveller, before women did such things and she painted 833 botanical paintings in such countries as Borneo, Japan, Australia and India.

When she eventually arrived back in England after 13 years away, she gave all of the paintings to Kew Gardens and also paid for a building to house them all. It has just been renovated and is stunning.


Ps, one thing that the Victorian's didn't do was minimalism.



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