After visiting the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh during the Fringe festival, it reminded us that Kew Gardens was right on our doorstop back in London and that we didn’t make good enough use of it. And so, two weeks later we put that right with what will hopefully be the first of many regular trips to London’s finest collection of flora. On a sunny Saturday, we marched through the Victoria Gate and straight into Temperate House, the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world that boasts over 10,000 plants from Africa, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Asia. We timed it just right as Gnomus Enormist, the giant puppet caretaker, was starting his tour. If you are lucky, you might catch Cirque Bijou in action too.
From there, we did a quick lap of the Treetop Walkway, jumped in front of the recently restored Great Pagoda (first built in 1762), and traversed the main lake at Sackler Crossing to reach the Bamboo Garden. Then we pushed on to The Hive installation designed by Wolfgang Buttress. It’s a multi-sensory, immersive experience designed to highlight the extraordinary life of bees, featuring an ever-changing array of lights and sounds that are influenced by the activity of bees behind the scenes! Running out of time (hours had passed by this point), we sped round the magnificent Princess of Wales Conservatory that juggles ten different climates, before finishing up in the rainforests of Palm House, aka the warmest place on Earth. I heard more than one person humming the Jurassic Park theme tune as we sweated our way through the insanely photogenic tropical habitat. And that pretty much took us back to where we started! Hopefully we’ll be back soon, and I’ll either update this post or put up something new, perhaps with a bit of sexy slow-motion B-roll to boot!
Plan your visit here – www.kew.org
