Dale Chihuly and a visit to Kew Gardens, London: For those not acquainted with Kew Gardens, it is a 300 acre botanical garden in the South West of London. Detailed information can be...

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Dale Chihuly and a visit to Kew Gardens, London

Aug 24, 2019 10:02:42 #

GARGLEBLASTER Loc: Spain

For those not acquainted with Kew Gardens, it is a 300 acre botanical garden in the South West of London. Detailed information can be found on the following Wikipedia site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kew_Gardens

At this moment in time (August to October 2019) it is featuring an exhibition (Reflections on Nature) of works by the American artist Dale Chihuly and I am posting some quick snaps of some of the works. They are meant to illustrate what can be seen and are not meant for photographic judgement so I hope that Admin. will leave them here and not move them to the Photo Gallery. I have put the correct names to some of the pieces but couldn’t remember them all so some photos are just numbered.

The main reason for visiting the garden was not only to see the Chihuly works but also to visit the “Temperate House”, the largest Victorian greenhouse in the world that has undergone a £40,000,000 restoration.

The entrance fee of about £17 might seem high but to maintain such a garden costs a great deal and money must be found by all means.

The wet August that we have experienced in London meant that the garden was looking very green and the trees looked magnificent as some of the attached snaps can attest, but there was something rather curious. One would have expected that in such a garden there would be a proliferation of bees and butterflies and birds but we only saw a couple of butterflies, one bee and about four or five birds.
I don’t think that it is possible to see everything in the garden in just one visit, there is so much to see, so my visit with a friend was limited to the Chihuly works and the “Temperate House”. We also took the land train that does a 40 minute route around the garden passing by some of the most important sites. One site was the longest double herbaceous border in the world. It is 320 metres long and each side is a mirror image of the other so that for instance, if you see a particular plant on one side, it will also be on the other side too.

In the great storm of 1987, the garden lost a thousand trees although looking at it now one would never know. All the fallen trees were recycled by one means or another.

In the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of botanical art there was a 48 minute film about Chihuly and how he works. Now he has a team working for him that do the actual physical work but it is he who creates and supervises the works.

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