If you are in London, Kew Gardens is running their annual orchid festival in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, which is a ten minute walk from the entrance once you get into Kew Gardens.
Entry is timed, but it is free, although entry to Kew itself is not free. So, buy a ticket for Kew and then choose your timed entry to the Orchid Festival. Do it online or you could be in for a long wait.
The queue you can see here is for people like Tamara and I who had bought tickets beforehand. In other words, if you didn’t buy a ticket online beforehand you would be in the other queue, which is back behind this queue.
There are signboards along the path near the Princess of Wales Conservatory, and they are spectacularly badly placed unless you are about seven years old, in which case they are at a reasonable viewing height, You can see one of the signboards in the photo above.
We stood in this queue of about fifty people who had tickets for the timed entry, and the queue moved slowly. And no one, as far as I could see, looked at the information boards apart from Tamara and I. We were two people together, so we could nip out of the queue to look at the boards while the other one kept the place in the queue.
More to the point is that the boards were hardly about orchids at all. They were very interesting though, talking about the teams who were investigating biodiversity in the endemic homelands of most orchids, which is the island of Madagascar.
Madagascar, in case you can’t place it on the globe, is a long strip off the east coast of Southern Africa and it is a strange little piece of the continental puzzle. When the continents were all joined up, there was one little piece that drifted apart all on its own. That’s Madagascar. And because it has been separate for so long, it has a make-up that is all its own.
And in case you can’t picture how big the island is – it is a bit smaller than France or Spain, and therefore about two-and-a-half times the size of Britain.
The stacked-pyramid looking building you can see in the background ahead of the queue is the Princess of Wales Conservatory. And once we were in there the orchids on display were beautiful and there were lots and lots of them – a profusion of colours and displays and well worth seeing.
As I said, the information boards outside were not about orchids. What about inside?
My Wife Tamara Noticed Straight Away
No, as my wife Tamara noticed straight away and pointed out to me, in the Princess of Wales Conservatory there was nothing – nothing about orchids – no description, no explanation – nothing about what orchids are, anywhere.
The explanations that there were in the Princess of Wales Conservatory were about – you guessed it – Madagascar.
Somehow the organisers failed to see things from a visitor’s point of view. And that is triply odd because the festival was named – you guessed it – ORCHIDS, and all the advertisements were about the orchid festival.
Nowhere did we see anything that explains what an orchids are, what characterises them, the way they grow, that they are epiphytic in warm humid climates – or what that means – and the risks they face from drying of the environment as is happening in Madagascar.
[An epiphyte is a plant that grows on the surface of another plant and takes its moisture and nutrients from the air, rain, debris, and water around the host plant. They are not parasites and do not damage the host plant.]
So my tip if you are planning on visiting is to read up a bit about orchids before you go – Wikipedia has a very good page on them. And then you will feel a bit more knowledgeable when you see orchids seemingly attached to trees, and wonder how they manage.
The Orchid festival continues to 3 March and here is the link.
To wrap this up, I took the photos of orchids at the top of this article with my Ricoh GR III, a camera with an APS-C sensor. It’s a fine camera and yet – here is an iPhone photo – and really phone cameras are so good now, aren’t they.
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