London and Kew, Thursday, May 29, 2025
After a quick croissant and coffee at our local French cafe, we headed for the District Line, which brought us to the little train station a couple of blocks from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. This would be our fourth visit over the years, but there is always something new: the place is enormous.
We started by strolling between one of the ponds and the Palm House.
The Palm House is not just impressive, but important in the history of architecture. It was built by architect Decius Burton and the iron maker Richard Turner between 1844 and 1848; it was the first large-scale structural use of cast iron and glass. It predates the Crystal Palace built in 1851 for the Great Exhibition, which is usually credited with being the first important glass and iron structure. (Author’s note: some of the detail here is cribbed from the post on our previous visit, in 2022)
Here is the pond.
Kew’s Rose Garden is extraordinary.
It sits just behind the Palm House.
While Sue was picking roses to emulate in her garden, I took in an interesting installation a few meters away. The tree below is the ancient Lucombe Oak, first noted in 1760. The screen beside it is a collaboration between a team of botanists and an artist’s collective; it is a digital representation of the inner life of the tree through the seasons.
Next was a walk along the borders on the Great Broad Path; they contain 300 varieties and more than 30,000 plants. Sue was especially happy here, since she is rather suspicious of extra color in a graden, and these b0rders are all shades of green. We were constantly reminded of the labor required by a garden as large and complex as this one.
Lunch consisted of some fabulous ice cream from Hackney Gelato sold just outside the Orangerie.
We had never visited Kew Palace, the smallest of the royal palaces. Built in 1631, it is best known as the summer residence of George III (1738-1820) and Queen Charlotte (1744-1818). In case you’ve forgotten, George was quite a guy. His reign spanned the French and American Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, and took in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Despite, or perhaps because of, his lifelong struggles with mental illness, he and Charlotte had fifteen children, with three of them going on to succeed him as monarch.
The Queen’s Garden behind the Palace is a lovely example of a formal garden.
We had a long talk with the family in the foreground, Londoners originally from Jamaica. Their son, probably about 11, was an inexhaustible compendium on the royal palaces and the royals in general. I told him that he could make lots of money as a tour guide!
The gardens also include this gazebo on a magnificent mount of roses.
Some families seem to spend the entire day on the vast lawns; they share it with the many flights that take off and land from Heathrow.
We then walked along the riverside path through the Oak Collection; who knew there were so many varieties? The path ends at the Syon Overview, which looks across the River Thames to Syon House, the west London residence of the Dukes of Northumberland. It was designed and built by Robert Adam in 1760. Here you see it with ducks in the foreground. The wags among you might infer my relative respect for the aristocracy and for wildlife by the scale of the two objects.
The path then led down through a similarly varied Pine Collection before joining the Boathouse Walk which runs along the lake in this end of the gardens.
In preparation for the cliffwalking to come, we strode purposefully up the 170 steps to the Treetop Walkway, which leads the visitor in a broad circle above the…treetops.
The views really are very fine, and especially those down onto the Temperate House, another work by Decius Burton and Richard Turner.
The house contains specimens from just about every continent; the interior is lush and very warm!
Back in London, we did a bit of shopping for the grandchildren before returning to the hotel for a bit of pre-dinner recovery.
The whole crew met at one of our favorite gastropubs, The Pig and Butcher in Islington.
Here’s the merry band, gathered together for the first time.
In chronological order, I met David B. in 1963 and his wife Patti in college; I met Rory W. in 1968 and his wife Pravan when they were married in 1974;and we’ve known Cindy and Gary H. since 1987, when our daughters attended elementary school together. There’s another common bond, though: they’ve all been to Burma with us!
It was a joyous evening, and the food and drink kept things happy. We shared lots of vegetable starters (OK, and a couple of Scotch Eggs too. Most of the table ordered Halibut, which Sue described as wonderful. David and I shared a trencherman’s portion of Hogget. For those of you who, like us, are not devotees of British gastronomy, a hogged is a sheep aged between one to two years. Opting for hogget means the sheep have had the time to mature at pasture, and it shows, as the meat has a greater depth of flavour. Vegetarians, brace yourselves:
We rode a red bus home with Cindy and Gary, well fortified for our trip to Cornwall.