Kew Royal Botanic Gardens – 1st Gallery: Palm House, Waterlilies, Mediterranean Garden

Kew was one of the highlights of my trip to London last year. I only had one day. It needed three. I took over 400 photos. Some were photos taken for beauty; some for research. Natural history is a great interest of mine and places like Kew are a chance I don’t often get to see things I’d never otherwise be able to travel to see, from parts of the world and ecosystems I know I’ll never get to. For weeks after I got back from the UK, I dreamed I was walking around Kew again. I go back and look at those photos quite often, but for the blog, finally, I’ve chosen just a few, which I’m going to post here in galleries of a dozen or so pictures each.

First view of the iconic Palm House, built between 1844 and 1848. It contains not only palms but many other tropical trees and plants.

One of the Queen’s Beasts, which are replicas of a series of statues by James Woodford of all the heraldic beasts of the Queen. The originals are actually in a museum in Canada (in Gatineau). This is the Yale of Beaufort. What’s a Yale? The word is possibly derived from the Hebrew for an ibex, but it’s a mythical creature of medieval bestiaries via Pliny the Elder and came into the royal family through Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII.

The Palm House has iron spiral staircases up to iron walkways high above the ground floor. The whole place is very organic in shape, all curves.

One of the blue waterlilies in the Waterlily House. A stunningly beautiful flower. I think it is Nymphaea nouchali, but it might be N. caerulea – I forgot to photograph the label.

The roses were past their best in August, but a few repeat-blooming ones were still gorgeous. This is a Claire Austen.

This rose was the one plant in Kew for which I could not find a label, even though I crawled in under the bush looking for it, so intrigued was I by a rose that had hips shaped like chile-peppers. I still don’t know what it was.

More water-lilies . . . The huge lilypad is a Victoria cruziana, which wasn’t in flower at the time.

“King William’s Temple” was built in 1837 by Victoria’s order in memory of William IV. It overlooks the Mediterranean garden.

A black and white view of the pathway back towards the Palm House from King William’s Temple.

The same view, in colour. It was very difficult to get shots without people in them. People were everywhere, even when it poured rain, as it did shortly after this.

Kew was not only a chance to sink deep into botonizing and thoughts of what to do with my own tiny bit of earth, it was research. At last, I saw cork oaks. Cork oak leaves.

There were young cork oaks planted in the Mediterranean Garden, but they also had a cork oak log to show what the mature bark looked like. Cork oaks were taking on some significance for Ahjvar and Ghu in something I was working on, so it was interesting to see them, and the landscape of Praitan in The Leopard and The Lady, at least down towards the Gulf of Taren, was shaped in some respects by the Mediterranean maquis.

A path in the Mediterranean Garden, which I wandered into for research but which gave me lots of ideas for my own garden. Texture and colour in foliage …