After touring some wonderful gardens in the southern English countryside, we finished our trip in London at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show and our first visit to Kew Gardens.
We started our London stop with a lunch visit to Borough Market. As it was the beginning of a holiday weekend in England, it was packed.
We pivoted to a visit to Camden Market which was far less crowded but also less interesting. It’s been overtaken by Chinese junk shops and t-shirt stalls and the former charm is gone.
In the afternoon we went out to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which is an annual event in London that celebrates flowers and gardens from across the country.
What we didn’t count on was the entire country coming to see their flowers. Boy was it jam packed!
Surprisingly it was difficult or impossible to actually see flowers or gardens as there were just too many people. However we did manage to get somewhat close to the gardening glitterati.
Gardeners’ World titan Carol Klein was there along with the world famous gardener Monty Don. It was exciting to see them in person, although they were on TV and so we couldn’t actually hear them.
The best photo from the show was this one of an old English telephone booth.
To say it was disappointing doesn’t really capture the feeling. It was exciting to be there but not actually all that interesting or visual.
On our last day in London we paid a visit to the world famous Kew Gardens. It’s an amazing green space in the middle of the city.
Kew houses the largest and most diverse botanical collections in the world. Kew formally began life in 1759, but the first gardens in the area were planted in 1299.
There are five trees that survive from 1762, more than 250 years old!
Honestly we had worn ourselves out by the time we got to Kew and couldn’t see all that was there on the 330 acres. But we gamely walked the park.
It was a gorgeous day in London and very pleasant to stroll through the gardens.
The gardens are so large that you never felt crowded and there were ample opportunities to sit on a bench.
If you go it takes about an hour to get here by Tube from central London, and then a 10 minute walk from the Kew Gardens Station.
We headed back into London and passed by the most English of landmarks, The Mall and Buckingham Palace.
Tomorrow we return to Chicago. There will be another post or two about this trip in the coming days about restaurants and hotels. Some of the most popular posts on Pointy Enders include this information about our trips.
