Photo Friday: Giant water lily pads at Kew Gardens

Kew, London; May 2008

When I was seven my third-grade teacher gave us our very first assignment. We could do a project on any topic we wanted. I chose flowers.

I liked flowers and still do but the deciding factor was my aunt Frances who promised she would help me do one on flowers. She was a keen gardener and studying a horticulture course at the time. (She now runs a mail-order organic gardening supply business called Green Harvest, so get in there and order some seeds already!)

I still have the project somewhere in a box in Australia, though I imagine the pencil marks would be fading by now. (We weren’t allowed pens until fourth grade). The book is covered in a green material with little red flowers – I had a dress from the same fabric and I think my mum gave me the offcuts to cover my book with. Inside the book I wrote all sorts of practical information – how some flowers were edible while others were poisonous, how some bloomed during the day and others at night, and so on.

I also gave a pretty complete precis about the sex life of flowers – I’m not sure if I called it that but I certainly described the structure of the flower and how the bees moved the pollen around to fertilise the seed. I’d read the children’s sex-ed book Where Did I Come From? by this age, though I recall it didn’t interest me much and I didn’t really see how it related to the pretty flowers. It wasn’t until years later that I connected the dots and the expression ‘the birds and the bees’ as a euphemism for sex actually made sense.

Most of the drawings in my project were my own – I wasn’t that confident free hand but I was a pretty dab hand with the tracing paper and I copied a lot of illustrations from library books. However, there was one drawing that stood out from the rest. The night before my project was due we had an artist friend for dinner and he used my prized Derwent pencils to draw a picture on the last page showing a blonde girl (me) standing on a giant water lily pad.

I’ve loved water lilies ever since. Water lilies are not to be confused with the lotus – the flowers are similar, but the plants are quite different in their growing behaviour and the big give-away is the leaf structure. The lotus is a sacred plant in Buddhism and it’s symbolic that the beautiful flower thrives in mud, showing you can transcend the circumstances of your life. The flowers of the lotus and the water lily are both stunning, but I prefer water lilies because of the way the leaves rest flat on the water, suspended between two elements with the underside of the leaf in water and the upper side in air.

I mostly grew up in the city but I lived a few years in the country as well. When I was eleven we lived in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney and we had a lagoon near my house. One Saturday my friend and I took our lilos down to the pond and at one point we found ourselves in amongst the flowering water lilies. I decided to try to stand on one – an ambitious task given that the leaves were only about the size of a large pizza. I knew deep down it wouldn’t work but half believed in magic enough to try. Of course, I sank the leaf and my feet went deep into the squelchy mud at the bottom of the pond. I silenced my friend’s guffaws by telling her about giant water lilies in the Amazon Jungle that really could hold the weight of a human.

I’d forgotten all about this until May last year when I visited Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London and saw these giant pads inside the water lily house. What a thrill to see leaves that looked almost big enough for the story to be plausible! Sadly, I didn’t think they would take my weight – and I wasn’t game to try, especially with the security guards looking on.

The time for that is long gone – the giant water lilies of the Amazon can apparently take the weight of a human, but only a small child, and sometimes not even then. I no longer qualify. Hey, I can still dream!

Maybe I’ll come back as a frog in the next life.

This post is part of Photo Friday, a weekly blogging event hosted by Debbie of Delicious Baby.

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More about Kew

Kew Gardens is 250 years old, making it one of the oldest (if not the oldest) botanic gardens in the world. Joseph Banks, the botanist aboard Captain James Cook’s mission to Australia and the South Seas, was influential in its development and it’s an important centre for scientific research today.

I also think it’s one of the most under-rated tourist attractions in London. It’s a beautiful place to walk around with plenty of rare and interesting plants in the gardens and greenhouses. You can also visit Kew Palace, the country home of King George III (or Mad King George) and Queen Charlotte. He convalesced during his spells of madness at Kew Palace, a period captured in the movie The Madness of King George. The most striking thing about the palace is how small it is, as far as royal palaces go. It must have been very tough on his family.

www.flickr.com Niltiac1′s Kew Gardens in spring photoset

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Richmond
Surrey TW9 3AB
UK

Cost: Prices valid until March 2010 are £13 entry for an adult, £11 concession, and free to children under 17 when accompanied by an adult.
Opening hours: 9.30am with closing hours varying by season.
Public transport: Kew Gardens station is on the District line of the London Underground and also on the London Overground.
More information: www.kew.org

Related posts: Photo Friday: Warning at Kew Gardens

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Shopping links

• Amazon: Where Did I Come From?. [$9.95; eligible for free Super Saver shipping]
• Amazon: The Lotus Still Blooms: Sacred Buddhist Teachings for the Western Mind (Paperback). [$10.17 with a 32% discount; eligible for free Super Saver shipping]
• Amazon: Derwent Artists Pencil Sets 24 Color Set. [$17.38].
• Amazon: The Madness of King George (DVD). [$13.49 with 10% discount; eligible for free Super Saver shipping].
• Green Harvest: Organic gardening supplies.

Note: I earn a small commission if you buy via the Amazon links.

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