Visiting Kew gardens - the Palm House

The Palm House at Kew

The view from the top over the greenhouse at Kew

It was news to me that Mother's Day is not the same day across the world, but in the UK it was last weekend.  Lots of people just take theirs out for a meal but the brother and I like to take ours out for a full day of fun.  Two years ago we went and looked at a collection of Camellias, last year we went and stuffed our faces at a posh restaurant.  This year the brother opted out by not being in the country so I dragged the mother to Kew Gardens.  I jest, she was willingly taken.

Kew is a huge botanical garden on the outskirts of London.  It would be impossible to go round the whole thing in one day, and as it was freezing we stuck to the vast greenhouses.  The Palm house is a stunningly beautiful building on its own, it doesn't actually need anything inside of it to make you want to look at it.  Im glad we had the Victorian period in this country because they built buildings that looked good, with beautifully decorative iron work all up the stairs.  The building does look like it could do with a bit of TLC soon, but its still a beauty.

This shows the upper walkway, with two visitors enjoying the view

However Im here to chat plants, including this delightful banana.  It hangs in the walkway, and I nearly smacked right into it, because somehow I didn't spot it.  I wouldn't say the banana plant was exactly an attractive beast, I don't know if I have just caught it at an unattractive time or not.

This is a banana plant that grows where it wants

Thats actually my over riding feeling from the visit, tropical plants like those in the Palm House are different, but not necessarily attractive.  Its just nice to look at plants that you don't see anywhere else, but just because it grows somewhere exotic doesn't make it any more attractive than our common garden plants.  Take this pink flower for example, different, but not exactly stunning.  Thats not to say I didn't enjoy my visit, I did, I like looking at different things, but its amazing how many weird and wonderful plants there are.

Im not sure this is the most attractive pink flower I have ever seen, looks a little alien for my liking

Spikey! This is clearly a plant that feels the need to be aggressive

There were some lovely flowers, I really liked this simply vivid yellow one, and this super complicated pink and red number that reminds me of chinese dragons.

So bright, so yellow

Doesn't this flower look like a chinese dragon?

The best part of the palm house was the fact that you can climb up a beautiful spiral staircase and walk round a platform just below the roof.  This gives you a view over the tops of the highest plants like being in an actual tropical forest.  It also lets you admire the roof.  I may actually have been more interested in the architecture than the plants in this greenhouse.  I say best part, but Im actually fairly scared of heights so I was fairly quick to come back down.

I thought this was rather lovely, this is from the upper floor looking down across one of the two wings with the plants growing up into the roof

 

The magnificent spiral staircase

Visiting the Kew greenhouses is such a different experience to your normal garden visit, and it is well worth the effort of going.  Clearly there is far more to see than this, including a little surprise underneath the greenhouse.  I shall be covering more in other posts over the next week or so, including orchids and an unusual cucumber!

The beautiful ceiling to the greenhouse, must take a lot of cleaning