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Saturday, June 02, 2007

Kew Gardens in June

An Orangery Afternoon Tea
8" x 10", pen and ink and coloured pencil in Moleskine sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I can highly recommend Kew Gardens in June. Yesterday it was full of flowers associated with Georgia O'Keeffe - arum lilies, poppies and irises. Kew also has a great glasshouse which has wonderful orchids which are another favourite O'Keeffe flower.

It also had masses of flowers more commonly associated with English Gardens - peonies, roses - although both of course came from elsewhere originally.

It's so much easier getting good photos of flowers when they are in some sort of shade as you then get the shading associated with the structure of the flower as opposed to that associated with the direction of the sunlight.

The Waterlily House besides having wonderful varieties of waterlily is now host to lots and lots of different varieties of chillis! Kew has apparently decided it's having a Mediterranean summer. This seems to be focusing on the different sorts of plants that it's now possible to grow given the extent of climate change to date. You can even listen to a podcast if you visit the website! I've included a link below to a society dedicated to water gardening.

We had 'interesting clouds' yesterday which ran the whole gamut of colours between violet and deep purple - but fortunately the rain held off. The sketch at the top is my view of the terrace outside the Orangery where they have small orange and lemon trees growing in what look rather like zinc tubs

Visiting the shop at the end I was extremely pleased to find (and buy) Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections (Hardcover) by Barbara Buhler Lynes (Author). This has been produced by the Georgia O'Keefe Museum as part of their 10th anniversary celebrations. More about this after I've had a read. My reading on the way down to Kew was Arthur Wesley Dow's book!

I've also found the sort of book I'm after - but I definitely can't afford this one - "One Hundred Flowers by Georgia O'Keeffe" edited by Nicholas Calloway!

You can see the range of botanical books produced and sold online by Kew at Kewbooks [www.kewbooks.com]

Links:
on

3 comments:

  1. Robyn SinclairSunday, June 03, 2007

    Lovely sketch, Katherine. I'd like to transport myself to Kew Gardens to have tea in The Orangery. Yes, the O'Keeffe book does look fabulous but one could buy a small car for that! You've made a wonderful photograph of the lilies. I can't wait for the paintings.

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  2. Making A MarkSunday, June 03, 2007

    Thanks Robyn - I'm currently trying to locate a secondhand version in paperback in reasonable condition which isn't going to cost me an arm and a leg to buy and transport.

    The lilies look like they might actually be very difficult to do. I suspect I'm going to be leaving them to later in the month. They're just SO WHITE - the trick would appear to be getting the sculptural bit right.!

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  3. UnknownSunday, June 03, 2007

    Amazing photographs K - I hadn't thought about the differin light conditions and how they describe the flower.

    ReplyDelete

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