A Visit to Kew Gardens - Saturday 2 November
A visit to Kew Gardens in autumn is always a wonderful opportunity to savour the change-of-season colours, and a walk along the Treetop Walkway - yielding views across south London - seemed a good way to start.
After that, a stroll past the Rose Garden Tea Party, with edible plants spilling out of teapots and platters, led us on via the arching banana plants in the Palm House to a fantastic display of pumpkins in the Waterlily House.
Susan, Marilyn and Louise at the Rose Garden Tea PartyNever mind the orange Hallowe'en pumpkins which we all know, here were pumpkins and squashes in a rainbow of hues. There were stories - such as how they saved from starvation the first white settlers in north America - and tempting recipes both sweet and savoury. It begged the question of why we find so few of these wonderful vegetables in our shops - let's all get growing them!
A selection of pumpkinsOf course we also associate autumn with mushrooms and toadstools, and seven towering willow sculptures of different native edible fungi tested our ID skills.
In the bright and airy Nash Conservatory we found the International Garden Photographer of the Year exhibition (www.igpoty.com): the tendrils of a climbing pea plant intricately curled around a mesh fence; a still life collection of marrows like a Dutch painting; people moving between ramshackle sheds in allotment gardens overflowing with greenery against a backdrop of concrete tower blocks.
And trees galore: oak, maple, sweet chestnut, ginkgo, and the rarest of them all - a Wollemi pine whose nearest relatives are the monkey puzzle and the Norfolk Island pine. Roll on winter - maybe we should make time for another visit?
Susan B., 3rd November 2013
How I didn’t get to Kew Gardens
Susan had promised a coffee and cake for the person who successfully got to Kew Gardens by the most circuitous and time-consuming route; the numerous rail-closures might potentially make the proposed visit difficult to get to. My visits to Kew Gardens are scarce; compared to the penny that it once was, the somewhat high entry fees are a bit of a deterrent. However, the weather was forecast to be fair so I thought I'd go, at least for the coffee and cake. I worked out a nicely circuitous route which necessitated leaving much earlier than I would otherwise have needed to, beginning with a 474 all-night bus towards Beckton. The cost of a journey across the Thames on the cable-car would have made the free coffee and cake pointless, so I headed instead for the Woolwich Free Ferry, which wasn't running yet. That's not a problem, as there is a foot-tunnel under the river.
Arriving by bus at Greenwich, I found that I was too early for the river-bus service, but blagged my way onto one anyway which was going up to Westminster to begin its tourist duties. I'd thought to get a District Line train to Richmond from there, then travel on the Overground to Kew. That's pretty circuitous. However, a river patrol was just to about to set off upstream so I hailed the boat in the conventional “Ahoy!” way and convinced them that my free coffee and cake was a prize worth giving me a lift to Richmond for. The one-stop train journey to Kew was uneventful and I met Louise at the station where she'd just got off the train from Wanstead Park via Gospel Oak, which is the easy route anyone could have taken.
Now all that is a load of rubbish and it didn't happen – I travelled with Louise from Wanstead Park – but it made a good story and I was awarded the coffee and cake.
Edible fungi sculpted from WillowTogether with Marilyn and Susan, we had a lovely day in the gardens, encompassing the treetop walkway, a fungi fairy ring sculpted from willow, a wonderfully colourful display of pumpkins in the waterlily house, and the International Garden Photographer of the Year exhibition in the Nash Conservatory. Highlight of course was the bouncy carrot patch, which Louise and I tried. The carrots must have been a bit stale though, because they weren't very bouncy.
Apart from the special exhibits, there were the permanent ones including the trees, which particularly appeal to me. On a previous EFOG visit in December 2006, with Gill Light, Jane and Alex, I'd particularly looked out for the newly-discovered Wollemi Pine, and it was nice to see just how much it had grown since then. This is a remarkable species, having only been discovered in 1994 having thought to have been extinct for two million years and previously known only from fossil records of a family of trees which existed 200 million years ago!
It's a shame that possibly because of the perceived travel restrictions there weren't more of us there. In fact, there were numerous alternative routes or replacement services available, and it was a very nice day.
The Wollemi Pine in 2006, with Alex, Jane and Gill
The Wollemi Pine in 2013, with Louise and Marilyn
Paul Ferris 3rd November 2013