Albert's Greenhouse

I've been putting off posting about my visits to Kew in the spring of 2008, for several reasons. It's a huge place, it's an historical place, it was the last major botanical event of the trip, and in many ways it was more than simply a visit to a botanical garden for me personally.

Any discussion of Victorian plant exploration cannot avoid mention of the history of this place - the herbarium where plant specimens taken by Darwin, Hooker and pretty much every plant explorer since are stored - the glasshouses where rubber seeds liberated from Brazil by Richard Spruce were grown out before being shipped on to Sri Lanka - a potted plant collected before the Declaration of Independence was signed - all this and so much more of the very roots of botany is here.

Not to mention three years of a gardening reality show was filmed here. I'm a big fan of both Victorian botanical history and A Year at Kew. But more on that later.

Kew's not cheap and it's not close to the center of London. Out in Zone 3 on the District Line, Kew Gardens station is still part of the underground - but it's far. I estimate spending over $60 to get the two of use over there and inside the gardens ... and we went on two separate days.

We came at both a good time and a bad time of the year. The lawns were carpeted with early bright blue flowers, rhododendrons were just starting to come in to bloom, and we managed to hit a day when the meager sunlight was in fact visible through the clouds. On the other hand, the many of the lawns were more like swamps, the wind was bitterly cold, the sun set at what seemed to be an exceptionally early hour, the trees were bare and the Waterlily House was closed for the season. All the more reason to try to come back in summer this year, I guess.

Living in Northern California, we've come to regard February as about the last we'd expect of winter if we're going to get any at all. It's kind of like spring year-round here. Not so much in England.