October 6, 2005
Kew revelations
England has always been Mecca for American gardeners. Though the charms of Mediterranean climates have inspired some garden creators, as have tropical and desert regions, it is the English garden that for more than two centuries provided Americans with a vision of what a garden should be. I refer to our lawns, our hedges, our flower borders, and the flowers themselves: the daffodils, blue bells, roses and lilacs that we insist on growing in our gardens and to some are nothing less than the essence of a garden but which are not native to our land and often unsuitable for our local climate and soils. England is America's idea of a garden. So we revere and imitate English gardens, English gardeners, and desire English plants. And the main repository and standard of all this garden Englishness is Kew. That is, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
With that sort of cultural, you might say colonial, baggage on my shoulder and yet thrilled to be visiting the shrine, I entered the garden gate, Victoria Gate, after walking the short distance from Kew Station. Soon I was standing at the edge of the great pond staring spellbound at the heavenly apparation of The Palm House. (Film buffs might recall that it was Heaven in the original "Bedazzled" movie). A lesser replica of this palatial Victorian glass house stands in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco but I am compelled to say that it never elicited in me the dumb-struck awe I felt upon seeing the original.
I was not going to take photos that day, thinking that it would distract me from some purer, less mechanized enjoyment of the holy landscape. Thank the gods I brought the camera anyway. I became a mere extension of the tiny machine. It was my eyes. My brain sort of went dormant for the duration. And then my eyes ran down all the AAA batteries we had on us and my mad desire to capture the place for all eternity (or the current lifetime of digital storage hardware) had to be extinguished. This moment occurred at the entrance to The Palm House, the last stop on our half-day tour.
The pictures record our (me, friend Lu and her sister-in-law Julie who lives nearby in Ealing Common) selective pathway through Kew, covering perhaps less than half of the 300 acres of gardens, glass houses, historic buildings, museums and miscellany. We particularly followed the route of the Dale Chilhuly art exhibit--a series of blown glass scultures embedded in the plant exhibits and landscapes and scattered throughout a large area of Kew.
Most curious to me is how the photographs - after several viewings - revealed things that I had not seen and probably could not have seen with my organic eyes. The photos also helped me to articulate what it was about the place that so enchanted me and also made me think more deeply about what these artificial gardens and landscapes mean to people and why we, as humans, as Americans, as gardeners respond the way we do to the botanical world about us.
