Kew gardens and Eel Pie Island

On exploration days like this I love London. A while back little Miss Gerbil came to visit from Amsterdam and off we went for a free David Nash tour at Kew Gardens. I would have been none the wiser at understanding his artworks if I had just roamed around the gardens and come across his sculptures without knowing his lifelong exploration of natural materials. We discovered his propensity to work with trees, living ones with their roots still in the ground (which energetically link his works to the site he says) or trees that had succumbed to storm or age or disease, scattered across the 121 hectare site. The one specific statue is from a 300 year-old oak that had been weakened by drought, it became distressed and gave off pheromones which beetles picked up on and moved into. Along the way I saw 2 trees that were the same species, but one was male, the other female, her leaves were completely different and she was smaller. I loved the idea of trees that beckoned beetles to their doom, and husbands and wives that were rooted next to each other forever.

The Gardens houses the world's largest collection of living plants. We saw one of the oldest pot plants in the world, the 238 year-old cycad Encephalartos altensteinii which had been brought from SA in the early 1770s. The name Encephalartos in Greek apparently means ‘bread in the head’. Hottentots would remove the pith from the cycad's stem and bury it for 2 months before kneading it into bread and baking it in embers.

Then something I never expected to find, a new-found female idol known as Marianne North. She was a Victorian artist who travelled the world by herself and recorded the world’s flora with her paintbrush. There is an entire gallery of her works at Kew, filled from floor to ceiling of the natural sights she documented on her travels from Japan to Java. What an inspiration. At the end of the exhibit you could take a tag and write down a memory you have relating to a plant, reading some of the childrens' answers are worth a giggle.

The final stage of the day was a visit to an island on the Thames! Who knew. Close to Twickenham, I was drawn to visiting it by some hearsay that the hippy haven had denounced the Queen way back when, and had formed their own state for a day or two before the bobbies came and put them in their place. This was complete 'bollocks' a resident told me, but from the gnomed, mannequined and crocodiled decor, one could tell its not of the mainstream so to speak. Although a trendy apartment development had recently made its way onto the island, which means bankers will move in at some point and spoil the renegade charm of this artist collective. What a pity. All in a day's walk in London.