I saw this poster and decided that’s what I’m going to do today! I love both gardens and Chihuly’s work and have been wanting to visit Kew Gardens for donkeys ages so it’ll make a fine day out. The weather is supposed to hold until the afternoon so it should be a good day for strolling outside.

It’s an easy tube ride to Kew, District line straight till the end. As soon as I exited the station I thought “London is a city, but Kew is Britain!” It has a wonderful small English town feel to it, charming and quaint. Not adjectives used very often when describing London!

Kew is huge, so I concentrated on seeing the various glasshouses and Chihuly installations, and a quick whip around the perimeter.

The Hive is a modern art installation by Wolfgang Buttress representing the importance of the honey bee and other pollinators to our ecosystem and raises the question of what can we do to preserve them?

Kew Palace was built as a manor house in the 1631 but became a royal home a hundred years later. Famously George III and his family lived here 1801-on when he became “Mad King George”.

There’s some beautiful open vistas, paved paths as well as narrow trails everywhere in Kew. I explored the Rhododendron Walk, the Pinetum, poked my head into the Redwood Grove (still haven’t seen them in California!), passed the Japanese Gateway and gravel garden, and the Great Pagoda before reaching my next glasshouse.

The Temperate House is humongous, exhibiting over 1,500 species from around the world. There’s multiple Chihuly installations, so much so that one almost ignores the plants looking for the next grouping of glass!

One of the on-site galleries had a showing of some of his smaller works. I got to wondering how much his stuff goes for – small bowls are for sale in the gift shop for £6,000!!!

The Treetop Walk was a fun, slightly swaying excursion high above the ground on see-through metal grating. I think it’s supposed to mimic what a walk above a rainforest might be like but ones attention seemed always to be caught by where one was stepping rather than by the view around.

It just started to sprinkle while I was high in the sky so that was my cue to wrap up my visit and head back to my hotel. I’d been walking steadily for over 4 hours so I was looking forward to having a cuppa tea and waiting for Michael’s arrival.