london: the pelham hotel & kew gardens

We had such a lovely time in England! It was actually perfect. I'm excited to share some of the highlights with you over the next couple of weeks. :) I took about 900 photos, so I'll sift through them and show you the stuff I think you might like.

After we landed at Heathrow and got situated (the morning of April 1st), we took the tube to South Kensington.  We stayed at the lovely Pelham Hotel (that's it up there, through the doorway on the right), which is conveniently located diagonally across the street from the tube station.

We loved the Pelham, and hope to stay there again the next time we visit London.  It has the comfort of a modern hotel, inside a lovely old, interesting building. Claire slept in a foldaway bed at the foot of the big bed.  She loved that!

The neighborhood is beautiful. I loved all the terraces throughout this part of London, and the cute house numbers and topiaries everywhere. It all really appeals to my love of symmetry and order. :) It also reminded me of 100 Dalmatians. When I was little, I really wanted to live in the cartoon London of that movie.

Here is Paul, right across from the hotel, which is a chain of DELICIOUS French bakeries. We ate breakfast here both mornings we were in London. (They have inside upstairs seating and the best coffee we had the entire time we were in England.)

After we rested for a few minutes, we bundled up, jumped on the tube again, and headed for Kew Gardens.

Claire always finds cats to love on vacation, no matter where we go.

We entered Kew (officially "Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew") through the Victoria Gate.

Kew has a long, complicated, and interesting history, like almost everything in England. :) Because it's located on a prominent bend on the river Thames, it has been a busy site for thousands of years. They've found mesolithic tools and neolithic artefacts in the area, and other stuff ("stuff" is not the official archaeological term) from the Bronze and Iron ages. 

And then of course the Romans took over for awhile, and in fact some people think this is where Caesar crossed the Thames to invade Britain. (Veni, Vidi, Vici.) So it's really old and important. You get the idea. The history of the gardens themselves begins in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Anyway, years later Queen Victoria donated quite a chunk of land to the gardens during her reign, and so they named a gate after her.

The first thing you see coming in at the Victoria Gate is the Palm House.  It has 700 panes of glass, and was designed by Decimus Burton and built between 1844 and 1888.  It's considered the most important surviving Victorian iron and glass structure in the world.

Victorians were really into greenhouses because the British were traveling to exotic lands (colonizing everywhere they could get their hands on) and bringing back tropical plants which needed warm places to grow.

It's steamy inside! My lens fogged up. So did my glasses. :)

I've probably mentioned before that I'm afraid of heights. So sometimes on vacation, Bob and Claire do fun things without me, and I photograph them. It's best for everyone involved. Trust me.

We have never seen as many yellow daffodils in our entire lives as we did on this England trip. They are EVERYWHERE right now. And as you know, daffodils naturalize and spread, so once you plant those bulbs, they'll just do their own thing for years to come.

Bob's favorite mythological creature is the Griffin, so we try to photograph them whenever we see them.

It was early in the growing season to visit gardens, but Bob and I agreed the entire time we were in England that we were so happy to not be fighting the crowds during the height of the tourist season. We'd rather take our chances with the weather and see the spring flowers and the stark trees, than be smashed in with people not being able to see anything, anyway.

Here are primroses and daffodils, and cabbage and daffodils.

Claire got nipped by a hungry duck once on vacation to Disney World several years ago when she was little, which cooled her ardor for them quite a bit.

But she seems to have gotten over her animosity towards water foul, because she chased every goose she saw while we were at Kew.

Here is the Temple of Aeolus, and more daffodils.

I should note that the gardens are huge (300 acres), and we were jet-lagged and knew our ability to walk was not going to last long, so we grabbed a map and did a quick "Best of Kew Gardens" surgical strike in mostly the northeastern and eastern bits of the park. We were there for maybe three hours. (I forgot to mention that we started by eating lunch at the yummy cafe that was to the right when we walked in.)

Here's the Princess of Wales conservatory.

What are these orange flowers? I have no idea. Kew has the largest and most comprehensive living plant collection in the world -- they have representatives from one in every eight plant species in the whole world! It was fun to go somewhere that doesn't just contain the Home Depot garden department. :)

Here is the Rose Pergola and the Order Beds, ready for warm weather. I love the tidy expectancy of the order beds. What will pop up this summer? I do not know, because I forgot to read the markers.

Grape hyacinths are also all over England right now. They smell delicious.

And what is this twirly swirly plant with these sweet little bell-shaped flowers?

Here is my free-spirited girl doing a bit of dancing. It was so nice to walk in the fresh air after ten hours in a plane.

Okay, do you know what a monkey puzzle tree is? I had heard of them a long time ago, but had no idea what they looked like. Now I do. It's not what I had imagined at all.

We should stamp more pretty things into concrete here in the U.S.

This is Kew Palace. It is a British Royal Palace, but looks like a manor house. George III purchased this, and I think he and his wife (Charlotte) were the last royals to actually live here (you might want to check that -- I get them all mixed up a bit).  I also think Queen Victoria donated it to Kew when she gave them all that other land. It was opening for the season the day after we visited. :) I like it because it's more like a manor house than a palace, and you'd have the whole awesome garden to play in.

Bluebells! I wanted to jump in them and roll around, but refrained.

More daffodils!

Here's the Temperate House. You can't tell from this angle, but it goes back for ages, and is the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world. It's massive.

Who are these people? I can't remember. By the time we saw them guarding this door on Temperate House, we were pretty pooped. 

So we headed on out of Kew via the lovely gift shop. :) Then we jumped on the tube and headed back to the Pelham, where we ate downstairs in the fabulous bistro. I loved the turquoise chairs and the cyclamen in the windowboxes outside the window wells. We sat right by the window and it was fun to look up to see the street.

Then we all went to sleep. :)

More of London to come!