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Saturday, July 21, 2012

Europe CNY 2012 - Day 1, Part 2 - Kew Gardens

"I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous - everyone hasn't met me yet." - Rodney Dangerfield

***

Europe CNY 2012
Day 1 - 19th January - Kew Gardens
(Part 2)

The next stop was Kew Gardens. Granted it wasn't going to be too impressive in the winter, but the greenhouses would be nice, and I wasn't sure when I was visiting London again (it'd been 6 years since my last visit)

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Entrance

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Devil's Claw Proboscidea louisianica
This was a sculpture made of some organic plant material, not the actual plant

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Orangerie. Here there was wifi for you to download a Kew Gardens app. They blocked web pages but forgot to block foursquare and Whatsapp.

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Kew Palace

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Oriental Plane tree: fruit

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Oriental Plane tree

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Kew Palace, lawn

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Green bird in tree

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Green Bird

I then came across the first of many sponsored benches:

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"Cherished memories of my husband Mr. Mark Antony Yates. 1956-1991 and the many treasured hours spent here"

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Sweet Chestnut Tree

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Rhododendron Dell. Which looks nicer in Spring or Summer

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A very simple sponsored bench: "Dave's Bench"

Happily there were 2 spots of colour: camellias in different stages of flowering.

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Camellia japonica 'Prosper Vial'

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Camellia 'Lady Clare'

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Overbooked bench, dedicated to both Kathy Ward and Jack Pearce.
By this point I was suspecting Kew Gardens made more money from selling bench space than from ticket sales.

There was a Minka House. Minka being a Japanese type of house.

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On the Minka style, and the Minka House at Kew

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Inside the house

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Exterior of Minka House

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Are you suspicious at the bench placement? Do you suspect that they are not located for patrons' comfort but for some other reason?

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Azaleas, out of season

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Geese

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Circumcised narrow leaved ash

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Lucombe oak

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Syon Vista

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Annoyingly, the Rhizotron and Xstrata Treetop Walkways were closed. They should've lowered ticket prices to compensate.

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Lake with Sackler Crossing in the background

Then came the most suspicious bench placement yet:

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Benches scattered at random, as if by a mad artist
I went to check, and all of these benches were sponsored (in fact, I didn't see any NON-sponsored benches in Kew). I was positive that they were placed so that they could be auctioned off, rather than being pre-existing benches.

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Lake path

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Lake

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More cynical bench placement

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Perrys Weeping Holly

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Closed treetop walk

I saw a bench with 3 memorial plaques. At first I thought this was the most outrageous example of commercialisation yet, but a closer look revealed a different story:

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"In memory of Norman L. Dunbar"
"Sylvia R. Illman (née Dunbar)"
"In loving memory of Florence Dunbar"
The wife outlived her husband by a year, and the daughter died just shortly after her mother. Sad.

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One of Kew's Glasshouses, the Temperate House which "is the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world"

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A smaller glasshouse, the Evolution House. "This aluminium glasshouse is probably the oldest made from this material anywhere in the world". Hah.

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Evolution House
The place had a mixture of extant plants and artificial ones

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Jumping 3 billion years in a step

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Liverworts

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Ancient Forest view
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