Photos from Kew

My photos from Kew Gardens

Sorted into various categories.  Captions above a photo when I know something about the specimen.  

Flowers

Banana

Bluebells in a clearing, just beginning to shoot.  

 The clearing with the bluebells.

I got distracted by a butterfly...

Banksia

Moar Banksia

Rhododendron

Erica verticillata, extinct in the wild, survives only in places like Kew.

Tibouchina urvilleana, a South American climber.

T. urvilleana has climbed a good thirty feet up the ironwork!

Foods

Bananas

Ginger

Pepper

Prickly Pear (pick it with the claw)

Cocoa, for making chocolate.  Botany needs to breed a bush that you can just pull a Dairy Milk off of.

Raspberries, Rubus idaeus.  I want these in my garden!

Chillies

Coffee

And my favourite, the legendary Camellia sinensis.  You'll never catch me for more than two minutes without an infusion of this in my hand.

Architecture and Sculpture

Palm House

Three standing sculptures, looking a bit like a dugtrio

Get closer and you can see the grain in the wood, it kinda looks like some of that petrified wood...

Until you find this sign and realise they're actually bronze!

The Treetop Walkway

Me outside Temperate House

Temperate House and Evolution House from atop the Treetop Walkway.

 An amazing iron arbour, covered in wisteria.

That arbour from inside.

Minka

Minka

Kew Pagoda

Evolution House

Marianne North Gallery

Animals

Curious fish

Coral, a far more important thing than we give it credit for.

Terrapin

Piranha

Green pigeons (parakeets)

Robin heard flitting all around the inside of Temperate House.  I suspect that Temperate House might be home to two breeding pairs, either that or two males have gotten stuck in there and have moved to opposite ends of the greenhouse in order to avert the inevitable noisy brawl.

Cool stuff

This is a Holly when it gets big.

It has more of he traditional spiky leaves near the bottom, and more of these entire leaves near the top.  I guess it only needs the spikes where the herbivores are.  Do spikes require some precious nutrient to build or maintain?

This stump wouldn't stop leaking sap.  Presumably the warmth in a greenhouse drives up the cambium pressure.

I have it on good authority that pine cones are sexually dimorphic.  This rounded one is a female pine cone...

 ...whilst this phallic looking pine cone is a male!

Fossilised fern leaf

I don't know the name of this plant, but its leaves are as long as a man is tall!

The Oak of Asclepius?

More giant fern leaves!

A Cycad that's older than Kew Gardens itself.

Trees are set to colonise our southernmost continent.

This tree branched at ground level and stayed that way.  We never had trees like this when I was a kid, which is good because it would've taken all the challenge out.

I half-expected to see a panda in this lot!

I have this weird thing about trees that resemble the Whomping Willow.  The whompiest tree I've ever seen is behind a pub in Sheen, but this one between the Gardens and Kew Tube is pretty whompy.