I’m playing catch up with my blog posts at the moment so apologies if I’m a couple of weeks late…

I went down to London in June to visit my Australian penfriend, it was our last weekend together before she heads back home. She suggested we visited Kew Gardens on the Saturday, I jumped at the idea as when I lived in London in the 1980’s I used to visit Kew whenever I felt the need for a bit of green, which was quite frequent! I lived in the East End, so I would drive round the North Circular Road and wander for hours round the gardens, looking at the huge trees and inside the greenhouses. I loved it, it was my escape.

Roll on a lot of years and it is just as beautiful. Kew is managed by the Royal Horticultural Society, it was first recognised as a National Botanical Garden back in 1872, but there had been a garden there for many years before that. It houses the “largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world”.

We did two free garden tours whilst we were there, which were really informative. Some of the trees are very, very old, it always amazes me to think of history that has happened during the lifetime of a tree. 

There’s a large rose garden at Kew, full of David Austin roses, the scent was amazing. It was lovely wandering round and spotting roses we have in our garden. The photo shows less than half of it!

The palm house was stunning, just from an architectural point of view, never mind the plants! There were little mist puffers up near the ceiling which gave it a very ethereal feel inside.

I made a beeline for the waterlily house as I love waterlilies. I wished I had my DSLR camera with me (ideally with a telephoto lens!)  instead of my phone as the flowers were beautiful. Some of them were tiny and easily missed, others were huge.

Kew gardens is big, about 30 acres, so we barely scratched the surface in a day. We looked on the map to choose things we didn’t want to miss, I spotted a rose walk over near the herb garden, so we wandered there too…oh to have a rose arch like this!

I love looking at trees, their bark patterns, leaf formations, their shape, some of the barks at Kew were beautiful, I could see an embroidery made from this one…

The Temperance House has just been restored after years of work, it’s the worlds largest surviving Victorian glass structure. During our guided tour we heard about the difficult decisions and plans they had to make with plants and trees as they had to empty the Temperate House in order to restore it.

We spent a wonderful day just meandering around the gardens, it brought back many happy memories and made new ones too.