Winding down for Christmas

The weather has been too much for the carousel...

But the snowpeople have been proliferating...

Snow

Like coming out of the wardrobe into Narnia today.

Seasonal cheer

Christmas has arrived at Kew and it looks like fun for all the family. At least, I think so.

There's a Victorian merry-go-round...(£2 whether adult or child)

A retro dodgem thingy...

A horse and carriage ride... (£3 adults, £2 children)...

Even the Explorer has gone all festive...

Nobody actually in or on anything today, but then it was a dingy midweek afternoon.

No ice skating rink again this year. Perhaps they decided it was not environmentally sound, or.... didn't make enough money? The last year it was there, in 2008, it seemed to attract very few takers.

Plenty of other places to skate in London though.

One down...

The PLANtastic play area ("An outdoor play area shaped like a plant!") which consisted of metal tubes to crawl through and lots of brightly coloured signs has been taken down and  is to be 'repurposed' at Wakehurst. Very good news, as it was down the quiet end of Kew, in the Conservation Zone.

Rhizotron-Schmizotron

A quick google tells me that 'rhizotron' is not a theme park ride or the sponsor's brand name, but unexpectedly, a real word, which means an underground laboratory for studying root growth.

Except that the Kew Rhizotron is a creative 'interpretation'. You go into a dark underground room and look at animated videos of worms and centipedes accompanied by scary scuttling and sucking sounds. And then you go up the treewalk, which is what you actually came to see.  

The Rhizotron installation took 14 months and over 20,000 'person' hours to build, and this is what Will Jackson, director of Engineered Arts says about it:

"The root sculpture in the Rhizotron fuses two aesthetics, natural and industrial. I wanted to create the feel of a boiler room made of tree roots, imagine the pipe work that services a large hotel, providing creature comforts for the guests, we could think of trees in the same way, they are the services providers for our
planet, creating oxygen and controlling our climate, they make our planet habitable. Arne Laub, Engineered Arts’ designer with a talent for solving systematic problems, was handed the task of creating a series of parts that could realize these concepts, the finished design required 46 unique forms and 567 parts in total.

We wanted to populate this underworld with the denizens of the ground, those creatures that inhabit tree roots and live in the soil. Automata artist Matt Smith created animated wooden creatures, stag beetles, centipedes and worms to inhabit the porthole spaces within the sculpture."

More here.

Syon vista in the snow

The dark colouring of the holm oaks make a fine contrast with the snow in the Syon Vista (planted 1845-6).

It's not all bad: 1

What Kew does best: painstakingly growing the kind of plants we'd never normally see, unless we travelled there. The giant Madeiran squill currently flowering in the Davies Alpine House.

Earlier this year, a Kew scientist saved the world's smallest waterlily - only a centimetre wide - from extinction.

And how does this sound? A job resuscitating rare plants which involves feeding the seeds with pineapple juice and mashed banana, hoping they'll germinate, and then waiting five years for them to flower.

Beware: Explorer

It’s brilliant that frail, elderly and infirm people can be taken round the gardens in a vehicle. But do we really need the Explorer train, which in any case only has room for one wheelchair?

Walkers, including people with prams or in electric wheelchairs, are forced off the path while it passes, because it's so wide. We wait on the grass (or mud) as it slowly trundles past, listening to the loud commentary and smelling the engine fumes. Or the aftershave and alcohol fumes, if it's full of party-goers.

I'm in favour of some sort of motorised transport for people who can't walk far, but something slimmer and shorter would have been kinder for the vast majority of visitors who are on foot.

Again, lack of planning and forethought by the management. Combined with a wish to squeeze as many people in, at £4 a head.

Kew Explorer Train

The world's worst strapline?

Kew's strapline is ‘Plants, people, possibilities’

Who thought that one up? I’m with them on ‘plants’, that’s uncontroversially what Kew’s all about. The purpose of ‘people’ could be to persuade visitors that the gardens aren't just some dreary deserted bit of land. But ‘possibilities’ is just plain woolly, and obviously only in there for the alliteration.

The overall effect is one of insincerity, lack of imagination, and trying to cover all the bases.

Besides, does Kew really need a strapline? Isn't it enough to be (one of) the greatest botanical gardens in the world?

HOW much?

Kew Gardens entrance fee:

1910: 1 penny (24p in today's money, see www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/)

2010: £13.50 (= in real terms, more than 56 times the price that visitors paid a hundred years ago)

Adopt a duck

In the post today, Kew Gardens offer me the opportunity to dedicate a tree or area of woodland to 'celebrate the life of someone special'. The cheapest dedication is £250 for an area of bulb planting. Woodland areas are available at £1,000. Or a 'range of heritage trees' which 'start at' £5,000 each. Nothing for my budget, which would be to sponsor a small patch of weed.

Once you've paid up, they send you... a certificate. No commemmorative sign nailed to a tree in your individual woodland area (not that I'm lobbying for one!). Not even a nice letter from the tree at Christmas to let you know how it’s been getting on.

Next up, I predict an adopt-a-duck scheme. Or one of these splendid Kew chickens that live near the Marianne North Gallery.

Just a thought: wouldn’t a straightforward request for a donation to help Kew with its valuable work be less manipulative, more effective?

Why Kew Gardens need saving

Kew's 120 hectares of gardens have lakes, lilyponds, Victorian greenhouses, temples, follies, art galleries, palaces, cottages, exotic birds, and about 40,000 trees. What could be more idyllic?

Unfortunately ever since Ghillean Prance left as director in 1999, and particularly since Kew gained UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 2003, it's been steadily turned into a theme park. It's no longer enough for visitors to enjoy strolling around the gardens and woods. There have to be more and more attractions, entertainments and activities. It's becoming increasingly difficult to get away from the visually polluting modernisation to enjoy the tranquillity of nature.

This is how Kew's official site describes its purpose:

Throughout its history, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has made important contributions to increasing the understanding of the plant kingdom with many benefits for mankind.

Today it is still first and foremost a scientific institution. With its collections of living and preserved plants, of plant products and botanical information, it forms an encyclopaedia of knowledge about the plant kingdom.

The science and research departments at Kew do a fantastic job behind the scenes. What worries me is the visitor experience, which is now overwhelmingly commercial.  Admission is £13.50 for the 1.35 million visitors per year. Then there's the revenue from the 'Kew Explorer' train (£4 a trip), the £5 entrance to Kew Palace, the cafes and gift shops. Not to mention donations, the 'summer swing' concert tickets, and corporate hospitality services.

With an annual income of over £40 million, it's a little hard to understand why the place is looking so dilapidated:

Yet they spend money on pointless and intrusive structures like these: