Kew Gardens are one of the most important botanical and mycological collections in the world. They cover 133 hectares. They have several magnificent glasshouses, a treetop walk, a lake and so much more. Kew Gardens are managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew which co-ordinates the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, the world’s most extensive ex-situ plant conservation programme. This autumn, the Temperate House hosted an exhibition entitled “Celebrating Queer Nature”, dedicated to the diversity and heterogeneity of nature. An interesting exhibition. I was moved by the Pansy project, in which artist Paul Harfleet plants pansies wherever homophobic and transphobic violence has occurred in London and around the world. We were only able to see part of the gardens, but my dream would be to spend several days there painting flowers or taking part in one of their attractive workshops.
“Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart shaped and tongue shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.” (Kew Gardens. Virginia Woolfe. 1919)