Open London Garden Squares Weekend - or is it London Open Garden Squares Weekend?

According to Paul Wood, in a book I must get round to reading, London is a Forest. It's often quite hard to credit this - today, for example, on the top of a bus circumnavigating Elephant and Castle, it wasn't easy to see how something as vital and squishy as human beings manage to live here, let alone foxes and hoverflies and eight million (apparently) trees. 

If you did want convincing though you could do a lot worse than get a weekend pass for London Open Garden Squares Weekend, which is usually held about mid June, and stroll from green space to green space around Bloomsbury or Kensington. 

This time though we started at Charing Cross and the roof of the Coutts building (access was via ballot, as numbers are restricted). This is a container garden, including fruit and flowers, which runs around the top floor. It's an impressively thriving garden - I saw ladybird larvae - the sort where you know if you picked a tomato it would taste really good and not all watery like shop bought ones sometimes do, but it's more remarkable for it's location than the garden itself. As our guide pointed out, you could do this on lots of buildings - why don't we?

St Martins from the top of Coutts

I don't seem to have taken any more photos on the Saturday. I don't know why. We went to Waterloo Gardens and the Phoenix Garden and Bedford and Montague Squares, walked through Woburn Square Garden and Gordon Square (both of which I think are normally open anyway) and round Park Square off Regents Park - which has a tunnel connecting the two halves called 'Nursemaids' Tunnel' as it was built so that those with children could go under the busy road rather than have to attempt to cross it - and up to the Garden at the Royal College of Physicians. What most of these were remarkable for was my having vaguely registered some of them as locked gates or hedges behind cast iron railings without appreciating their size or tallying them up as green space. 

Somehow this lots-of-little-gardens knowledge feels like it adds up to more greenery than the vast swathes of the Royal Parks I'm already aware of. Perhaps not in acreage, but there's an intimacy to them - often it's usually only residents who have access - and a frequency as well, especially if you do as we did and visited them on the basis of proximity rather than any set plan. 

Sunday I was by myself so first went to the Royal Hospital for Neuro Disability, which is relatively close to me in Putney. Apparently the grounds were originally laid out by Capability Brown, but understandably the hospital has other priorities and there's a lot of modern buildings you have to try and filter out to get a flavour of what it must once have been like. There are also sensory gardens, and a terrace with roses, but it all feels a little incoherent. Nothing pulls it together as one garden. 

On the other hand it definitely is a very pleasant space for staff, patients and family to sit and eat lunch or wander while talking. 

The lemon sponge cake was divine as well. 

Then I went into Kensington. First to Earls Court Square, then Barkston Gardens. 

Then after that (passing Bramham Gardens, which were not open - some gardens are only open one day of the weekend, some don't participate, I think it depends on whether they can get volunteers) I went to Courtfield Gardens, which is a Garden of two halves - West and East. 

After that I went to Collingham Gardens, which is particularly charming because the residential buildings around it aren't the other side of the road as with most of these London Squares but back onto it and have steps straight in. 

All these have large grassy areas by the way, and two have children's parks with swings and things. Some have deckchairs. They're proper places for residents to play and rest. That said, it's not quite like a private garden. There are regulations about vacating at dusk or where you can play ball games or how many people you can bring in from outside. I don't know if the residents do some of the gardening - generally the Kensington ones seemed far too well groomed for that to be the case, whereas with the Phoenix Garden the fact it's volunteers and reclaimed materials is clearly the point. 

Next year, assuming it's running, I'd like to focus on Westminster and the City - although I suspect it will be slimmer pickings there. 

Kew - again.

This evening I went to Kew Gardens after work (they open late on Fridays in the Summer) to see the Hive; a new installation that feels like a cross between 'proper' art and a conceptual Chelsea Flower Show garden.

Essentially it's a giant climbing frame in a flower meadow, wrapping you around in lights and speakers. Pretty, with the buzzings and the lights changing colour, but much too serene and open and empty to be reminiscent of a real hive.

But perhaps that was because it was evening, and the bees were winding down for the night.

Of course one advantage of the evening is that it is that little bit quieter and you can stop anywhere - even bang in the middle of the palm house walkways - and take pictures without inconveniencing anyone.

Sissinghurst

Today I went to Sissinghurst via Staplehurst. There was a 30 minute wait for the bus so I walked into Staplehurst proper from the station first. It's a nice little town, small enough to think of itself as a village, with some attractive stained glass in the church and a pub I considered going into on the way back but ultimately didn't. There's also a memorial to five people - four of them women - killed in the Marian Persecutions. I'm unclear why a memorial was put up in the early 1900s for deaths in the 1550s - perhaps they had surviving relations. 

The bus from Staplehurst to Sissinghurst was a double decker with about three people on it. I imagine it gets very busy at the weekends, but on a Friday at twenty to twelve in the morning I had the whole top deck to myself, so I could sit at the front and admire the glorious Kent countryside. It's a beautiful part of the world at this time of year, with trees almost meeting above the road and then dropping away to reveal sweeping views across green fields. 

The bus stops at Sissinghurst village and then there's a walk - a mile to two - to the gardens.

More glorious views, including my first sight of Sissinghurst Castle - framed below by hedges, sky and sheep. 

The gardens seem tended but untamed - everything spilling over the paths and reaching for the sky, and the roses dropping petals. It's not quite of this world. I didn't take too many pictures - I wanted to soak it up - but I stopped to smell every second rose and sweet pea.

The whole place shimmers with light and life, martins or swallows in the gatehouse roof, swooping in and out and calling, and bees swarming around the chimney of one of the garden buildings.

I was also amused to see that one of the books on their extensive shelves in the main library was a yellowing hardback of The Anatomy of Murder by the Detection Club, which I recently read myself in a reprint.

Vita's smaller library and writing room in the tower can be peered into from the stairs - a wonderfully cluttered and cosy spot - but not entered.

Kew

I didn't get up and do my canal walk yesterday. Instead I went into town to return and renew some Westminster library books, since I won't be working in Westminster any more and may not have them on me next time I wander through on the way elsewhere.

Today I went to Streatham Cemetery (which is in Tooting, just to be contrary) and later Kew.

The cemetery is looking nice, although some of the trees came down in the high winds and rain we've had and have damaged a few gravestones. We (that is to say the Friends of Streatham Cemetery, of which I am a very lax member who doesn't even go to meetings, but does occasionally sell tea and cake on open days) have finally got the back gate fixed, and hopefully will eventually be able to persuade Wandsworth Council there is a call for it to be opened most of the day (at the moment it will only be open when the friends are seeing to the beehives, which is only a couple of hours a day, and obviously that limits how much local people can rely on it being open).

There's a real need, because it's a green space in an area where a lot of people don't have gardens, and it's safer as well - kids can come in and practice cycling before going on the proper roads, and it's a pleasant short cut to the bus route, instead of going a mile out of your way along quite busy streets. So if the council can be persuaded and the custodian hold a duplicate key and open it up during daylight hours it would be a big plus.

Kew was also good but the orchid exhibition was terribly crowded. My youngest aunt and I went to see that specifically, breaking her general rule that you should never go to see any exhibition in its last or first week because it's always terribly crowded. Also £10.90 for tea in a paper cup and 2 slices of cake is daylight robbery, even when I'm not the one forking out for it (and of course we were breaking my general rule of never buying food in tourist traps. See post on Paris). My treat next time, when we will hopefully have The Boy (my cousins 4 year old) with us again.

Which sort of segues me on to schools. When I first went to school I was 5 and 3 months. Not the eldest child but not the youngest. I'm not exaggerating when I say I was the only child able to read at all, and that because my mother had taught me.  The Boy is 4 years and 9 months, started school in September, and is already expected to read 3 letter words. Not his mother's expectation (although she's doing her best to ensure it now it's flagged up) - the school's.

He's at a private school - because his father wanted it and is paying fees, but it's still quite odd, isn't it, that he's expected to be reading 6 months before many of my contemporaries had checked out the alphabet?

At least he's not on the terrible billy blue hat, johnny yellow hat books his mother was on at first though. I remember thinking I'd never have bothered to learn to read myself if they'd tried to get me interested in that tripe.

Mr Men, that's what you need, and Snoopy, and the Puffin.. hmm, I think I feel a trip to the Waterstones website coming on.

Also, here is a photo I took of the Kew shop:

I was wondering - are orchids meant to be hung upside down to grow?