"What?! Are you mad?! The whole nature of gardens is that they're outside!!"
Well thankfully not at Kew. In fact, Kew is home to some rather large, wonderfully temperature controlled, tropical greenhouses. Not only that, but currently their yearly orchid festival is on, so one greenhouse in particular is a riot of beautiful colours and smells.
Kew's orchid festival has been running for 23 years and this year, there's a particular focus on Thailand (which apparently is home to 1,100 species of orchid and to 10% of the world's flowering plants!).
Wandering around the greenhouse is a spectacular experience. Everywhere you look, beautiful flowers are there. Arches drip with orchid blooms and other plants whilst living pillars rise up, some even supporting mini pineapple plants! The smell is just incredible too.
The exhibition is very well put together - winding paths take you in all directions through the greenhouse so I felt a bit like an explorer, waiting to see what was around the next bend.
The center piece of the exhibition is a magnificent model of a Thai palace in the middle of a pond. The roof's covered with flowers and blooms burst through the palace arches!
Whilst walking around, I liked how the more 'permanent' exhibits hadn't been removed for the festival - before reaching the orchids, you wind your way through a cactus garden and inside the main exhibition, small side doors take you off to oggle carnivorous plants in all their boggy glory.
(Tangent alert: when I was little, I used to keep different kinds of plants in my windowsill. I started off with cacti - supposedly the easiest plants to look after. I killed them. Weirdly, some were over-watered, others dried out... My next obsession was carnivorous plants - I had a Venus fly trap, a sundew plant and two different types of pitcher plants. These boggy little terrors also met unfortunate ends. Next up was an orchid - this rotted in its pot! Safe to say, I am not at all green fingered, but you can definitely see why a greenhouse full of orchids, cacti and carnivorous plants appealed to me!)
Eventually, I'd seen just about everything in the greenhouse (and taken enough photos to last me a life time) so I ventured back out into the cold... before quickly heading back inside another tropical haven - the Palm greenhouse.
This glasshouse was more interesting than I was expecting, especially considering everything in it was 'just green' - it housed different kinds of palms from all over the world and it made you feel like you were in the middle of the jungle! I especially enjoyed climbing the wrought iron staircase to gaze over the tree canopy. (plus, it was warmer up there!)
For me, visiting Kew was a pretty magical experience and it's definitely a resource I plan to make more use of going forwards. Visiting at Christmas for their light show was one thing, but it was another to see what they're best at - growing spectacular plants. If you want to visit, the Orchid Festival happens for just one month (Feb - March) while these beautiful flowers are in bloom and it really does have to be seen to be believed. Entry to the orchids is included with your day ticket (and it's cheaper to buy your tickets on line in advanced!). I think the festival ends on March 11th so there's just a week left to go see it but I would thoroughly recommend making the time.
