Friday 24 July 2009

Kew Gardens is Nice

Kew Gardens, map, thumbnail linkVisited Kew Gardens on Thursday with the family, to scatter our Mum's ashes.

Kew Gardens is cool. It's a 121-hectare site, with a collection of plants and habitats from around the world, and various public greenhouses with their own microhabitats (one of which has its own multicoloured lizard running wild). It's been going in various forms for about 250 years, and it's been a national botanical garden for about the last 170. In some ways it's the forerunner of the Eden Project, and it's the only site that I know of in the UK, other than my place, that has chocolate trees.

As well as the on-site research stations, there's now also now a satellite site at Wakehurst Place, where they do more of the Millennium Seed Bank Project stuff.

Mum wanted to be a tree surgeon when she was a kid, so she was really into Kew, and was a paid-up member. She even had an old (legitimately acquired!) Kew Gardens sign in her garden.

So it was kindofa a nice day.

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