Autumn at Kew: Glorious Glasshouses

It's time for another installment of OH MY GOSH KEW GARDENS IS SO LOVELY, YOU GUYS!!!

On my autumn visit to Kew I went for a long walk around the gardens admiring all the autumn colour and texture, and ooohing over the many magnificent trees.

I also spent lots of time in Kew's glasshouses, because they're a) lovely and warm to visit on chilly autumn/winter days and b) totally awesome. 

The green lushness of the Palm House is always a treat, and visiting during the quieter months of autumn means you get to enjoy it with fewer people around. Sit on empty benches. Soak up the quiet and the magnificence around you.

I absolutely cannot get enough of all the dramatic shapes in this place...

... and the interplay between the strict lines of the architecture and the soft wildness of the planting.

Being able to get up high and look down on all this lushness also never gets old! If I lived locally to this place I would come and sketch here aaaaall the time.

The Palm House might be forever fabulous but my unexpected highlight of the day turned out to be the Waterlily House.

I've blogged about this petite glasshouse before (it's a delight!), and knew it was a lovely little place to visit... but what really charmed me on this visit was the misty, slightly over-grown, slightly fading, autumnal vibe it had.

The same space as in the summer, but with a totally different mood! So good.

Catch up on all my posts about Kew Gardens.

View my travel archive for lots more posts about my days out in London and around the UK.

Kew Gardens in March: The Palm House

On my March visit to Kew I took a spring stroll round the gardens, was dazzled by the annual Orchids Festival, then decided it was time to take a look inside the famous Palm House.
 

The massive Victorian Palm House was built in the 1840s, creating a rainforest-like environment to house the palms and other tropical plants brought back by Kew's botanists from their travels. The oldest potted plant in the glasshouse was actually brought to England in the 1700s!

 

 

The curves of the glass and iron building are pretty iconic - that's a word that's overused these days, but I think it applies in this case. When it was built, this was the biggest glasshouse in the world and the architects had to borrow techniques from the shipbuilding industry to make it work.

 

 

The Palm House is essentially two attractions in one: the building with its sweeping curves and decorative details, and the plants themselves. The two combine to make somewhere unique and really rather magical. 

 

Stepping through the doorway from a brisk English Spring day into this tropical wonderland is quite an experience. While the displays of orchids are a riot of colour, the Palm House is a tapestry of green: different shapes and shades and textures mingling together in a lush collage. (I'm mixing my metaphors a bit there but never mind). 

You could spend a whole day in here with a sketchbook and a camera and not get bored! There's so much to see - including birds flitting here and there, and hopping through the undergrowth. I was thrilled to see a wren (one of my very favourite birds) and stood quietly watching it for as long as I could before it vanished into the leafy depths. 

And as if all that loveliness wasn't enough, you can also climb the spiral staircase to the viewing platform for views down onto the greenery and an uninterrupted view of that incredible roof.

Click here to see a short video about the Palm House, and click here to read the rest of my blog posts about Kew.

Kew Gardens in March: the Orchids Festival (and a Very Lucky Lizard)

Sitting down to write this blog post I've realised how terribly timed it is - here I am blogging about the annual Orchids Festival at Kew Gardens when this year's festival has literally just finished and you'll have to wait a whole year to see it for yourself. I am a bad, mean blogger and I apologise.

Hopefully enough of the sheer joy of the TROPICAL COLOUR EXPLOSION that is the Orchid Festival will seep out of these photos for you to enjoy in the meantime!

The annual festival runs from mid-February to mid-March in Kew's Princess of Wales Conservatory and is a wonderful burst of warmth and colour. I visited in 2015 (regular readers will know I'm sloooowly blogging about my year's membership of the gardens in 2015, which is one of the best things I think I've ever spent money on) and absolutely adored it.

 

The Conservatory is already a gorgeous space to explore, but the addition of the orchid-filled displays is the icing on the botanical cake.

I got a peek at the preparations for the festival when I visited the gardens in January, but I was entirely unprepared for the sheer volume and variety of the orchids that would be on display.

I don't even like orchids that much (I don't dislike them, don't get me wrong, they're just nowhere near being my fave flower or my top choice for a houseplant) but en masse like this they made my heart positively sing.

You can learn all about orchids and their habitats at the festival, of course. Kew is never short of opportunities to learn some fascinating plant facts. But I mostly just wandered about gazing at the displays, trying not to repeatedly say "wow" out loud or let my jaw drop open in front of passing strangers.

All that and I encountered one of the Conservatory's resident pest controllers - a very chilled out Chinese Water Dragon who wandered across one of the paths to everyone's great delight. I'm not sure if lizards care about orchids (I'm guessing probably not), but a massive glass house has got to be a pretty great space for a lizard to live!

More Kew adventures soon!

You'll find all my Kew posts here, and you can read about all of my travels in the UK here.

You might also enjoy reading about my visit to the Camellia Festival at Chiswick House & Gardens.