Life, with the garden
Location: London, England • • • Visit: June 2013
I’ve been to London twice before, so I felt that doing the typical sightseeing and going into the center of town wasn’t necessary. So, when visiting Maija, the Finnish friend I made while both of us were living in Tanzania in our early teens, we decided to spend my London Sunday together at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.
Kew is, according to their own website, the finest botanic garden in the world, old, huge and in 2003 added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The garden was first created in 1759 and now covers 121 hectares of land. The greenhouses are magnificent to look at. So classy, these old greenhouses felt worth seeing more for the architecture, than for the plants growing in them. I could really see the 19th century high society ladies walking around on the wide paths in the greenhouse with their lacey gloves and long silk skirts trailing after them.
The little waterlily greenhouse, one of all the small greenhouses, is completely taken up of a round pool full of waterlily leaves. It was such a lovely little place, and so warm. London was cold and raw on this particular Sunday, and going into the humid and fragrant waterlily greenhouse was such a lovely respite for the constant threat of rain outside.
The Gardens are immense. One corner of the garden hosts most of the greenhouses and the meticulously planned thematic gardens. Most of the grounds, though, are made up of an arboretum. It felt like an airy forest with many different kinds of trees, and it was only when I happened to look at them from just the right angle that I saw that some of the trees actually grew in straight lines. It was impossible to explore all parts of the arboretum in a day. Kew is a place worthy of many visits, strolls in different seasons.
After visiting Kew Gardens, Maija went back home and I went to meet up with Marie, another old friend who is now living in London. I’ve written it before, but I can’t stress it enough. Internet communities such as Facebook and Couchsurfing are really great inventions for world travelers like me. How else would I be able to contact all these people that I’ve met a long time ago and then suddenly happen to be geographically close to again? We had a really nice time, Marie and I, in a café close to the Kew underground station, talking about my trip and her efforts to kind of get used to London life.
These kinds of brief encounters, connecting your present life to your past, I think they are important. Or at least they are to me. I get so wrapped up in whatever I’m doing at the moment, that I forget how things used to be and in the end I might race into the exact same kinds of problems again and again, as if I never learned from my own mistakes. Meeting people that I haven’t met for a while briefly takes me back to who I used to be, and that in turn helps me see my present situation more clearly. Kind of. It was nice, anyway, meeting Marie and Maija in London. I guess that was my main point.
Katja Malmborg 