Started off well with the car park making a much better impression than the rather tatty car park at Wisley.
Wonderful gardens, not in the flowery way like Hampton Court, but more park like with lots of splendid trees (some unusual), ornamental trees and shrubs (lots in florid flower on this visit), less formal gardens and vistas. Interesting ponds and lakes. Some nice patches of grass, just coming into flower and with lots of buttercups. The whole place seemed terribly well kept and I only spotted a single convolvulus in the course of the day. Not bothered by other people despite the number of cars in the car park; the place was plenty big enough to soak us all up.
Following the vein of drooping trees (see 4th April) interested to come across a specimen of sequoia pendula, although nowhere near as flash as those offered by Professor Google, who also turned up a nature picture site which I have not come across before, http://www.arkive.org. I am pondering about whether I approve of this addition to literature and whether it is worth a donation. In the meantime, the oddity of the expedition award went to the giant ivy climbing up an oak tree, illustrated above. A bit of an oddity in such a well kept garden, but maybe it was a special ivy providing the special habitat required by an even more special beetle. There was also http://www.toscabella.it which included a picture of the finest cedrus (atlantica glauca) pendula that I have ever seen, making Hook Road look very infantile.
Perhaps next time we will take a peek at the seed bank - which is presumably trying to do something about the diversity which was the subject of the post on 6th June.
Coincidentally, we had just previously been asked twice by the National Trust to fill in an online questionnaire about the place and I have now done it. It seems that despite being the Trust's best seller at 500,000 visitors a year (our far more frequently visited Polesden Lacey at number 8 with 300,000 visitors), the place makes an unsustainable loss for Kew who run the place - National Trust just owning it - and the questionnaire was mainly about what one thought about the various options for making more money.
The impression given was that each National Trust site has to break even and that cross subsidisation between sites is not allowed. A reasonable stance which, while a little inflexible, avoids a lot of acrimonious disputes about which national treasures are worth a bit extra from central funds.
I voted for the option which simply charged National Trust members - who normally get free access to all national Trust sites as part of the membership package - to get in but without introducing a lot of complications like hourly car parking charges. The excuse would be that this was not a proper National Trust site at all.
I forgot to suggest that maybe they should sell off the house for flats. A bit isolated, but one could think of worse places to down size to. Maybe use the bigger rooms for conferences or training courses. They have the catering facilities and I would not have thought that the extra traffic would show much, in among the 500,000 visitors they have already.
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