Better Homes and Gardens Out of Cornwall

I think Taylor secretly hoped that once we left Cornwall we would be done with Better Homes & Gardens.  We pretty much were done with the homes.  When we got to London we found lots of things to keep us busy and only a few of them involved gardens.  Here are a few highlights.

Globe Theater
We've been attending plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Oregon for the last five years.  Since we were in London we thought, why not visit the Globe Theatre and see Romeo and Juliet?  We toured the theatre in the morning and then came back for the play which was spectacular.  Our take way is that OSF is definitely holding its own in the world of theatre. We have seen plays equally amazing in Ashland.

We took a tour of the theatre in the morning before the performance.  Stage hands were getting the stage ready, and we saw a bit of the understudies practicing.  The surprising fact for me about The Globe is that is was built in in the 1990s.  No kidding.  The original was built in 1599. It burned and a second theatre was built but in 1644 it was pulled down to build tenements. The current Globe is near the second location and built to resemble the original.  We both enjoyed learning about theatre in Shakespeare's age, and attending a theatre run pretty much the way it was run in the days of yore.  We even had to pay extra to get seat cushions for our wooden backless bench seats.

Borough Market
Who doesn't love a market?  We went here after our tour of the Globe and before Romeo and Juliet.

Jersey Royals from the Isle of Jersey.  We saw these being grown and we ate them in Jersey a few years back.

Kew Gardens
We took the underground out to Kew Gardens which is in a suburb of London.  Wow!  It is spectacular. It is a huge botanic garden, founded in 1840.

I have never seen such an extravaganza of allium.  Wow.

This orchid blooms once a year and is pollinated by bats.  It's color is much more pale turquoise than my photo shows.

The Handkerchief Tree.  How I love it.

Oxford
Oxford is about 2 hours by train from London.  We know it, of course, from the TV shows Morse,  Lewis and Endeavor.  Being the home of University of Oxford I felt my IQ grew just by being there. I think it is prettier in person than it is on the TV shows.

The colleges were not open for tourists so we had to be satisfied with looking through the gates.

We had our lunch at The Bear.

Oxford Botanic Garden
It was lovely walking through Oxford.  But, it was also lovely walking through The University of Oxford Botanic Garden. It is the oldest botanic garden in Great Britain and one of the oldest scientific gardens in the world. The garden was founded in 1621 as a physic garden growing plants for medicinal research. I think Taylor kind of liked the medicinal aspect of the gardens.  I loved all of it.

I enjoyed seeing the University buildings behind the plantings.

Kensington Palace

Kensington Palace was walking distance from our flat.  I walked over there one day.  I didn't go in, but I did check out one of the gardens.  The gardeners were replanting it in a "white" theme in memory the Princess Diana.

The palace is big, but not all that remarkable from the outside.  It was over run with tourists.

Queen Victoria lived there.

Hyde Park
Hyde Park is nestled next to Kensington Palace, and it too was walking distance from our flat. It's a lovely city park.

This city park has a lot of wildlife.  There were heron, swans and parrots.

Peter Pan.

Victoria's monument to Prince Albert is so enormous I couldn't even get it all in the pictures.

This is one corner of Albert's memorial.  I think it represents Britain's colonization of India.

We were busy when we toured Cornwall, and as I look back at our time in London I see that we were even busier.  London is a wonderful city.