Sunday, December 27, 2015

London Lights, Part Four: Kew Gardens


Kew Gardens

27 December 2015

The Victoria and Albert Museum is a strange place. The focus is on textiles and decorative arts. We didn't spring for tickets to the shoe exhibit. Instead we spent a few hours looking at baroque furnishings from Europe from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It's not really my thing, but it's not not my thing either. It beats paintings of naked angels.

There was this:


And a flask that requires the drinkers to go mouth-to-mouth with a deer:



A work by Chihuli hangs in the main entrance:




In the evening we met up with PDaniel and went to Kew Gardens for "Christmas at Kew." I was expecting more of a standard lit tree experience than the let's-see-what-else-we-can-do-with-LEDs experience.

It was all outdoors. Much of it involved lights that changed colors faster than I could focus on them.

At the entrance to the path:


The greenhouse:




Along the path:


Trees lit from below (we got closer later):


The land of the singing gumdrops: Each tree tracked with a choral voice. One or two appeared to be mute.




Lit from the ground:



These changed color too:




Fire on the ground, and a creepy sun face (all sun faces are creepy):










The pointy things again:


This tree was interactive, the colors changing as kids turned cranks:















Finally, a static display, and my favorite of the evening:











Snowdrops and crocuses (and, by the way, PDaniel informed us that no, daffodils don't normally bloom here in December):







Fountains:




Moon in mist (real, not a display):


The entrance tower again, different pattern:


2 comments:

Mirage said...

Wild wacky and wonderful light show! (and probably knock-your-socks-off expensive to produce. Guess I can't aspire to have anything like this in my yard any time soon).

Mirage said...

Wild wacky and wonderful light show! (and probably knock-your-socks-off expensive to produce. Guess I can't aspire to have anything like this in my yard any time soon).