MrPinto's Adventures: Kew Gardens

I used to work tech support with a man named James. James was the guy that trained me on the software we supported after my hire and we shared a office for the purpose of that training. "Feast or famine" would be a good way to describe the workload managed by workers in that position. During the times of low volume, James and I would talk about all sorts of stuff. I have a lot of interests and like to talk about them, and he was curious about everything and had a lot of questions. It worked out. He fell into a running joke that there was no subject that I wouldn't have something to say about and in fact began a quest to find the subject that would disprove his theory. After a while I switched from support to engineering, but we still talked pretty frequently and he eventually found a subject that I knew absolutely nothing about. That subject was botany.

Now, I told that story to tell this one: Heather, my awesome friend from TJ (high school), is a botanist. She knows as much about that stuff as I don't, and she's been practicing her craft in England for a few years now. Near as I can tell (and I've already admitted I'm not an expert), botany isn't like software development where you can do it anywhere with a computer and an internet connection. You need, I should think, to go where the plants are. When I was visiting, that meant curating the plant collection at a museum, but it had previously meant working at a botanical gardens.

Two mega-paragraphs in, we've discovered the Adventure of the Post! On the third day of our trip to England, we visited Heather's prior place of employment: the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens. Just because I couldn't tell a stamen from a pistil doesn't mean that I can't appreciate a royal garden when I see one.

Heather and Melch can also appreciate a royal garden when they see one.

Kew is, roughly speaking, a pretty big garden. Or really, collection of gardens, green houses, research areas and, for some reason, peacocks.

Who doesn't like a peacock?

There's a Japanese-inspired garden, a nifty tower, a bunch of ponds, all that sort of good stuff.

Nothing says "England" like a Japanese garden

Thy had flowers too.

These flowers were pinkish white.

These flowers were whitish pink.

Heather likes flowers.

Melch also likes flowers.

Besides the flowers and towers and such, there was also a pretty neat tree-top walk. You could see Wembley from up there, watch the planes on the approach to Heathrow, or just watch the kids running around the 100 foot tall walkway at unsafe speeds. Whatever you were into.