Weekend away

Goodbye London

Passing Painswick churchyard

In a Painswick Garden

House hunting -

Walking near Stroud -

 Some lovely gardens in or near Cheltenham -

 Cotswold countryside -

Goodbye for now -

To Kew, for noble trees and spring flowers

 A book swapat the station, how civilised!

 Small plants in big pots at the entrance -

 Shy sunshine behind dark clouds, and the Thames running hight and fast after the recent rain -

 A hornbeam, if I remember right - possibly this - or maybe not! But doesn't it have wonderful twisty branches, and dappled bark -

 This is an elm, a tall one -

 In the distance, magnolia -

 Coming to the end of their flowering, the pale crocuses -

Ah, nature!

The week included a trip to Kew Gardens for the purpose of drawing. But we spent a lot of time looking at trees ... I have a fascination for Swamp Cypress with its knobbly roots - known as knees - that may help the waterlogged tree to breathe -

 These roots belong to a Mexican Cypress -

These ...

 ... became this -

The little blob is definitely not a squished insect!

 Inveterate collector, I found seeds and other bits on the ground

 and took them home, to spend time looking hard at them -

 A forgotten bag containing an earlier collection yielded these -

for subsequent observation and recording, though I forget what they are. Larch and alder and oak and London plane are among them, but what are the long dark ones?

The strong winds have sent pairs of reddened crabapples cascading from a tree round the corner, but those on another street, a different variety, clung tightly -

 And the back garden at Tom's has had a deluge of apples from the tree next door, each with signs of a resident insect and some with a bruise. Two grandmothers spent a congenial hour collecting, chopping and peeling (and discarding) and making apple puree to be frozen for porridge and/or for the grandbaby -

Kew Gardens, always a revelation

The water lily house, with a bit of Chihully glass - one of the 26 installations of glass throughout the gardens -

 

papyrus

looking in through the old windows

 The big border, how fabulous, changing through the seasons -

 The Hive (buzzing, in the background) -

Wonderful trees - each one is labelled. After a lot of guessing and then searching from the label, by the end of the day we could identify various types of oak (holm, english, red) and planes (london, oriental) and discovered that corylus was hazelnut, and could just about tell an Atlas Cedar from a pine or spruce, and distinguish swamp cypress from metasequoia. Just about.

a pyramidal London plane

my Arbre Du Jour - grey pine

world's largest smoke bush???

And just when you think you've seen it all, you come across a glade full of hydrangeas ...

 ... so you really, really notice the hydrangeas in gardens on the way back to the station -