Welcome to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,

Last two weeks are being extremely sunny in London and I wanted to make the most of it by going outside.

Kew gardens is one of London’s treasures. You can explore different regions of the world and see some of planet’s rarest plants, as well as mango tres, giant palms, banana trees and more. It is in the East of London normally, about 40 minutes from the City centre.

Unfortunately I didn’t see everything last Saturday because of a failure in the Tube. The line from Hammersmith to Kew Gardens was suspended and my special visitor (thanks for your patient!) and I were trapped in a bus in a traffic jump. It took us to get to the gardens from Victoria Station almost 2 hours, what a disaster! But it was beyond our control. It has been the first time that I’ve gone out of the city centre and I’ve learnt that as well as in Madrid, here during the weekends the highways can be a chaos. We got to the place at 2.45 and it closed at 4.15. My recommendation is to go there at earliest at possible and to plan to spend at least 3 hours.

In the end it was very worth it. I don't remember such a beauty Botanic Garden like this. I haven’t seen so far many British gardens but I guess this a good example of England’s green and pleasant countryside. We had time to go through the famous Palm house where we could admire plants from all around the world. When you walk through their humid tropical rainforests, you can discover how we can depend on the plants that inhabit these parts of the world. In the basement there is a small but excellent tropical acuarium.

Outside, the landscape is amazing. The mix of different colours, type of plants, glass houses, lakes and historical buildings has a bearing on the beauty of this place. We enjoyed a lot by strolling.

Another reason to come now is the fact that Kew Gardens is hosting until April a landmark open-air exhibition of 28 large-scale sculptures by the acclaimed artist Henry Moore. We didn’t pay so much attention on this but we could realized how the sculptures complemented the landscape and I think it can be very interesting to see it from the other side, that is, to see how the changing light affect the sculptures throughouth the seasons.

Given that we are in winter, we couldn’t see so many seasonal flowers but at least we found the area around the Victoria Plaza transformed by a stunning Crocus carpet. Here, hundreds of thousands of purple and white flowers appeared to create a magnificent burst of colour. And also we could admire some Narcissus along the Broad Walk that links the Orangery to the Palm House.

We had to run to be on time at the exit since we wanted to spend until the last minute and we finalized the visit when at the Lion Gaten at 4.20, very closed to a beautiful Pagoda, the most distinctive landmark.

Sometimes when you visit a place, and you left it, you see at your back and you think, I’ll come back once more. This was the case.