Not my first and definitely not my last visit to Kew Gardens. I adore this place, it makes me feel like the Grow Lab makes me feel - full of joy and wonder and inspiration and a desire to know more and simultaneously show everyone the cool things I find. So, here are some cool things I "found".
Top Row, left: thought it was quite weird how this plant sprouted mini leaves in a different arrangement on the tip of some of its longer leaves. A break in the pattern is always so interesting, and there's always a reason for these things - I wonder what it is.
Top Row, right: This white "flower" immediately caught my eye. Not because its a flower without petals, but because it looks so much like dendritic branching in the brain! The white color makes it look even more like neuron branches, and the little buds on the end of each flower-branch simulate synaptic buds too. Seeing things like this makes me realize that biology really does have a shared code to some degree - or maybe its more like life all operating under the same set of laws...
Pictures taken at Kew Gardens
Bottom Row, left: Flowers within flowers! The bright yellowish orange sprig looks like its the main flowering bit of the plant but then it produced smaller white flowers! Constructions like these, with such different colors and structures again make me wonder what happened along this plant's evolutionary path. Other times, I'm just interested in the sort of style a plant can emulate - and this one looks quite modernist to me.
Bottom Row, right: I've seen plants like this before, in Colombia, so when I saw this one at Kew I immediately smiled and called my friends over to show them. (They were probably less excited about it than I was). This plant has leaf ALL over! If you look closely, the bits that are usually just "sticks" or stems in between the conventional leaves, are also surrounded by leaf-material in this plant! Its like its wearing webbed leaf gloves around its woody structure. Again, I'd love to know why this plant has this characteristic and others don't.
After walking around all of the green houses, we went to the art gallery inside Kew Gardens. I found the botanical illustrations beautiful, both the huge lilypad and the smaller ones depicting all the plants and foods mentioned in the Koran. There was an installation in another room with red walls where a laser cut cube was suspended in the middle of the room with a light shining from the inside. It cast beautiful shadows that at times looked like wallpaper, or a rug pattern, or like being inside a kaleidoscope. Despite liking most of the art displayed in the gallery, I thought there was a huge potential for educational or interactive art that wasn't being taken advantage of. Maybe in the future I'll have a chance to design a workshop or create/curate some art or research at Kew.
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