Summer at Kew: Rock Gardens, Peacocks & Climbing Roses

Kew has a lot of famous attractions - like the glasshouses - which are the absolute "must sees" when visiting the gardens. During my year of membership, I visited these a lot but also fell in love with some of the quieter corners of the grounds.

One of my favourite areas at Kew is the rock garden. It's huge, and includes several waterfalls!

The rock garden is arranged in six geographical areas and contains a huge variety of different plants from all over the world. These aren't big, showy, spectacular plants but they're still lovely and the cumulative effect of them all in this large rock garden? Wonderful!

Having a year's membership to Kew (which is surprisingly affordable, especially given the price of a day ticket!) gave me time to fully explore the gardens, of course, but the real treat was coming back at different points during the year and seeing how much things had changed. Look at how bare the rock garden looked back in January!

Near the rock garden in the early summer there's a walkway covered in climbing roses (super pretty)...

 

 

... and down by the Palm House pond you'll find these awesome plants with umbrella-sized leaves (this picture does a terrible job of showing just how big these leaves were but trust me when I say they were huge!).

I really enjoyed my summer strolls round the gardens...

 

... especially round the lake, which was looking lush...

... and it's always a joy spotting some of Kew's peacocks!

 

Click here to catch up with all my posts about Kew.

Click here to view my travel archive for lots more posts about my days out in London and around the UK.

Summer at Kew: the Rose Garden

The main problem with visiting somewhere like Kew Gardens is that you come home with a frankly ridiculous quantity of photos filling up your camera roll.

There are just so many lovely things to photograph, particularly if you're wandering round on your own instead of chatting with friends. I find if I'm visiting places with friends I see something lovely and say "ooh, look at that, isn't it lovely" but if I'm on my own I express that same "ooh" by taking a photo!

As you may have already gathered, that's what happened when I explored the rose garden at Kew one summer.

It was a beautiful day and the roses were looking (and smelling) fabulous. I spent ages walking from bush to bush, admiring individual flowers and then standing back to soak in the flower-filled vistas.

Just like when I visited during magnolia season, I was far from the only person wandering around gazing at the flowers in a bit of a daze!

I ended up chatting to quite a few of my fellow rose-admirers, some of whom had come from the other side of the world and others who lived just down the road and came to Kew every week or so for a quiet walk.

Kew's rose garden is located behind the Palm House, so you also get to enjoy the curved lines of the glasshouse as you roam around peering at petals. The formal borders of the rose garden are quite a contrast to the lush greenery inside the Palm House - exploring one and then the other would be a very enjoyable combination.

Ah, there's just so much floral loveliness! I would apologise for filling this blog post with quite so many rose pictures but I'm not actually sorry at all.


Want to read more about my visits to Kew Gardens? Click here!

If you're a fan of roses, you may enjoy this post about Queen Mary's Gardens in Regent's Park. For more brilliant blooms, check out the Camellia Festival at Chiswick House.

Click here to browse my entire archive of travel posts.

Regent's Park: Queen Mary's Gardens

A few weeks ago, after visiting wonderful bookshop Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street I decided that instead of retracing my steps to Bond Street to catch the Tube home I'd walk in the other direction, taking a detour to Regent's Park en route to Great Portland Street.

I'd only ever been to Regent's Park once before, walking up the Broad Walk quite briskly on my way to the Jewish Museum a couple of springs ago. I'd been meaning to go back ever since, so finding myself nearby on a lovely sunny afternoon I thought it was the perfect time to do some more exploring!

This time round I visited Queen Mary's Gardens in the Inner Circle of the park. The main gates are rather fancy, marking both the opening of the gardens in the 1930s and the Silver Jubilee of King George V.

Queen Mary's Gardens are famous for their roses - apparently there are approximately 12,000 roses planted within the gardens, making it London's largest collection of roses. The roses are (apparently) at their best in the first weeks of June but when I visited in early July the gardens still looked and smelled amazing. So many roses! And such waves of scent!

There was also a spectacular border filled with delphiniums...
 

... and lots of interesting, densely-planted pathways to explore.

As well as the formal planting, there's also a small lake within Queen Mary's Gardens. The lake and its surrounding planting are just buzzing with wildlife - I saw so many different birds on my short visit.

At one end of the lake you'll also find a waterfall and a Japanese garden, which is actually on a little island in the lake (you know how I feel about tiny islands). The garden is looking a little bare at the moment as it's being replanted, but it's still full of character. You cross over the wisteria-covered ornamental bridge to reach the island, then follow the path round to explore.

A Japanese garden on a tiny island in an ornamental lake in a rose garden in a royal park? What a treat!

I'm so glad I decided to take a detour through the park instead of heading straight home. 

P.S. If you're a fan of Japanese gardens, there's also a lovely one in Holland Park - complete with peacocks.

Actually Finishing Things

So, last summer I started stitching a gorgeous rose from Eline Pellinkhof's book Stitch & Sew Home.

 

I started working on it in June and in July I wrote that " I just need to finish the butterfly and finish filling in the background"... and here it is about eight months later and I'm only just getting round to getting it done!

After the initial rush of excitement of working on a project it can be easy to neglect it and never actually finish it. In this case I'd stitched most of the design and had got "stuck" on the final steps because a) stitching lots of white was much less interesting to stitch than watching the pretty rose design appearing, b) I couldn't decide what colour floss to use for finishing the butterfly and c) I couldn't decide whether or not I wanted to stick with my plan to frame the rose in a hoop.

Picking it back up again this month I chose a floss colour for the butterfly within about a minute (maybe I have bought more floss since last summer??) and took only slightly longer to decide "to hoop or not to hoop".

Instead of adding some extra greenery to make the design work in a hoop I opted to unpick some of the background stitching I'd already added and stitch the original square background. Unpicking the stitches was fiddly work and took an absolute age, but it was worth it to get this project out of my WIP pile and closer towards being actually finished.

In Eline's book the design is for an embroidered cushion...

... but as I've stitched mine on a much smaller scale, I'll be making a mini cushion - maybe a lavender scented one?

First up: finally finishing stitching this pattern!

A Cross Stitch Rose: In Progress

The cross stitch rose I'm stitching is progressing nicely. Here are a couple of pics of how it looks at the moment:

Like the pattern I'm using? It's one of the designs from Eline Pellinkhof's lovely book Stitch & Sew Home.

I've stitched most of the design now, I just need to finish the butterfly and finish filling in the background. In her version, Eline uses the darkest green of the leaves to also stitch the body of the butterfly... but the shade I've used isn't going to work for this so I need to pick an extra colour. I've been umming and aaahing about what colour to use, so in the meantime, I'm slowly filling in the background with white stitches.

I've decided to display the design framed in a 6 inch embroidery hoop. This cuts off a little bit of the design but I think it looks nice having the frame filled with colour.

Looking at these photos though, I totally should have thought to extend the leaves a little bit to better fit the circular space (the straight edge at the bottom looks especially out of place). Maybe I'll unpick a bit of the white and add a few extra green stitches? Hmm...

Stitching a Rose from Stitch & Sew Home

Remember that cross stitch project I showed you the back of the other day? Well, here's the front!

I'm stitching a pretty rose pattern from Eline Pellinkhof's lovely book Stitch & Sew Home. which I reviewed last year. In the book the pattern is stitched as a cushion but I'm using ordinary embroidery threads and sewing it to (probably) be framed in a hoop (I've not 100% decided yet).

So far it's mostly been a lovely relaxing project and perfect for half-asleep evenings in front of the TV.

Unfortunately when it came to choosing the blues I wanted to use I changed my mind a few times and had to do some tedious, fiddly unpicking (unpicking cross stitch is such a pain). This pic was taken mid-way through the third bit of unpicking...

First I used a too-dark blue (top left in the picture below) for the butterfly. I unpicked that, and re-stitched with the lighter shade (top right, below). Much better!

Then I started adding the second shade of blue (bottom right), decided it was too close to the new main shade I was using, unpicked it, started stitching with an even paler shade (bottom left), decided that the new blue was actually too pale after all and wouldn't stand out well enough against the white background, unpicked again... and went back to the original second shade. What a faff.

I'm happy with the blues now though (hurrah!) and am making a start on adding the greens...

... one shade of green down, two more to go. Fingers crossed I won't need to do any more unpicking!