I’m on a trip to London this weekend to enjoy my favourite gardens. There are so many! There’s Kew, of course, which I spend a whole day at. I will stay at the Holiday Inn Kensington Forum and hop a few tube stops to this beautiful botanical garden. I love the glasshouses, not just because they look beautiful from the outside, but because inside there is so much to learn and I will never, ever get over the beauty of the palm house, with its deep green leaves and ornate white frame. Inside these houses is treasure: a treasury of knowledge about the way plants make our world and where things we take for granted come from. Plants that cure illnesses, plants that feed us, that make our food tastier and our lives more beautiful. Intricate plants, huge, ridiculous plants with flowers that start three metres above the ground and loop down in an absurd and beautiful manner. Then there’s the rose garden, which I last visited in the autumn but will now be so intoxicatingly full of blooms that I can’t even stretch my mind to imagine how beautiful it will be.

So that’s one day dealt with. Then there’s a morning at the Chelsea Physic Garden, which is full of clever plants: more medicinal plants and edible plants and so on, but also clever planting combinations and a lovely solitary secret feel to this green plot in the middle of throbbing London.

And - perhaps this will surprise you - an afternoon in the parks. These have such incredible planting but people rarely appreciate them. Go to the vegetable patch in St James’s Park, and then look at the old crooked medlar round the corner and the flowerbeds with their funny mix of towering echiums and bedding plants and tell me these parks aren’t beautiful in their own right. Go on. Or at the very least, enjoy your time there. I know I will.

In collaboration with IHG.

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