Ben took his humanities test this morning, then headed to the doctor. Apparently that cough that so bothered him all during Paris has been there for weeks--Andrew was hoping he'd be able to join up later, but the insistent rain made that an impossibility. I was doing my laundry, and thus donned a dress for our trip to match those blue Wellies. No umbrella, but my coat and childhood in Seattle was sufficient to enjoy Kew just fine.
After a lunch of obscenely priced meat pies and meeting Devri's boyfriend come to visit her, Nikki demanded warmth in the form of the nearest greenhouse. We walked in and it was something out of Jurassic Park. Palm ferns criss-crossed the hundred foot ceiling, spiked grass, creeping ivy, gnarled African trees and papaya plants the size of watermelons turned the glass house into a jungle. We shed our coats at once and began to wander; I ran my fingers through the lacy Japanese maples and pink cattails, amazed at leaves that glowed silver and gold. We took the stairs below to find an aquarium of algae and every character from Finding Nemo we could think of--big silver bass, Dory, neon seahorses, a puffer fish, and even Jacques, who looked made of clear plastic except that he was scuttling along the bottom after a lady friend. Climbing the stairs to the top, we saw the domed glass ceiling and the view from a zipline, looking down into the dark jungle and feeling the heat rise up. The rain-spattered windows were cloudy with spots of green, not quite hiding a royal pond and fading rose gardens beyond.
The rain didn't convince any of us to stay out long--we hopped from house to house, visiting the Waterlilies (six foot pads, with flowers the size of soccer balls), the Evolution house (from the Big Bang to today), and the Temperate House (rainforest to African desert). My favorite part was the Tree Walk--we climbed ten flights of stairs to bridges over trees slowly turned scarlet; the bridges weren't much more than mesh netting, and we could see clear down to the grass below as we stepped, swaying in the rainy wind. It was like something out of a Keats poem, floating above the trees, afraid and enchanted.
We all voiced our regret that the weather was so poor that day. But watching the raindrops ripple the surface of a calm pond, sprinkling on our heads as they slid off maple leaves, and turning the earth chocolate for the autumn, I kept feeling like the sun is entirely overrated.
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