Kew Gardens

In Friday's Birthday blog post I'd mentioned our plans for a day out at London's Kew Gardens.  It is somewhere I have always wanted to visit, so I was really pleased when mum suggested we go.  The weather was perfect, we couldn't have asked for better, the sun shone all day.

The place is huge, quite possibly too big.  We didn't actually manage to see it all, then again I'm not sure that could even be possible, not in one day anyway.  

We focussed our time on the main attractions within the garden, it may have meant that we missed some treasures but it seemed the most sensible thing to do given the time we had to squeeze it all in.

We started off at the Xstrata Treetop Walkway.  It made a change to walk around above the trees as opposed to beneath them and size wise in terms of how long it took to walk around the walkway was just perfect.

We then made our way across to the Japanese Gateway and Pagoda passing the Temperate House that was unfortunately closed for restoration. 

After having a sit down at the base of the Pagoda we walked across to the lake along Cedar Vista wandering past the Woodland Glad, Redwood Grove and the Waterlilly Pond.  

As we then headed for lunch we admired the Sackler Crossing bridge as we walked along the edge of the lake.

I will be honest up till this point we were all feeling rather disappointed.  There had been barely many flowers and not much to see apart from trees.  It is more like a park than a garden. 

Things improved after lunch as we entered the iconic palm house.

I fell in love with the spiral staircases and balcony, they were beautiful.

But still barely any flowers.  From up on the balcony we looked out the the rose garden but even that didn't look up to much so we decided to call it a day and head on back home in an attempt to miss the Friday traffic (we failed haha).

Maybe we were just really unlucky or maybe we were looking in all the wrong places but I was gutted.  For somewhere I've always wanted to visit it really seemed like a wasted journey.  I guess it's true when they say, you win some, you lose some.  We still had a lovely day though, so not all was lost.

~ Gem x