The wardens at the Crystal Palace camp gave us a map showing the route to Kew Gardens. You take the Ring Road. Now for those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, a Ring Road is a circular highway around a city. All we had to do is stay on the Ring Road (Route 205) until we got to Kew Gardens.
Apparently by the time it occurred to the authorities that London should have a Ring Road to alleviate traffic, it was too late. There was nowhere to build such a road. They settled instead for designating certain city streets to identify the concept, stringing them together in such a way that you drive on city streets all around London! It took us an hour and forty minutes to get to Kew Gardens. Despite the highway designation number, there was not one inch of highway roadway involved!
We didn’t stay too long. While the park is huge and probably lovely in spring and summer, it is already autumn and it’s been a very dry summer in England. There wasn’t much in bloom and it was getting pretty brown all over. There were three big greenhouses (picture of one), though, including all kinds of plants from different areas of the world.
Our judgement on it was that it may have been spectacular once, when plantings such as this were rare and no one had the chance to see many of those things before. But there are now botanical gardens all over – and we do after all live in a tropical climate. It wasn’t that interesting to us. And, frankly, the orchid display didn’t come close to the Marie Selby Gardens in Florida, the outside was not as lovely as the Buchard Gardens in Victoria, Vancouver, and the formal gardens didn’t come close to Kuekenhoff (which is spelled wrong, I know). How’s that for a jaded assessment?
Having spent all that time getting there, we only spent about the same amount of time seeing the gardens, and then drove on to Stonesfield.
