Things we learnt while travelling the world at Kew Gardens yesterday

And menu planning for people who are allergic to menu planning

For far too long recently we’ve been staying at home. A combination of uninspiring wintry weather, mild colds, and an attempt to save money has kept us from getting out and about. We all have a high tolerance for staying home, but I was starting to feel the creeping madness of cabin fever. So yesterday we dropped everything and went on a Big Day Out to Kew Gardens. Here’s what we learnt, saw, and did:

1. On the way I read a couple of pages from The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth, about biomes. Our primary reason for visiting Kew was the Princess of Wales Conservatory, which has ten different computer-controlled climactic zones, from desert to rainforest. So we talked about what a biome is, and how they are categorised according to how wet/dry and hot/cold they are.

2. I told them how the conservatory is managed: it’s built partly below ground level, to conserve heat, and the windows are opened electronically when ventilation is needed. We were inside when one of the misters started working, so we learnt how they keep the air at the correct humidity. This was a great way of thinking about the different variables that make a biome what it is.

3. We saw the pagoda tree, planted at Kew in 1762. It now has a brick construction protecting its roots, and various metal crutches supporting its branches. Incredibly, it is still alive.

4. All the trees at Kew have labels on them giving their names and where in the world they originate from. The children love finding and reading these labels. We did some tree identification and spotted a type of oak we’d never come across before by noticing its wavy leaves.

5. Last week we read about baobab trees in Around The World in 80 Trees, and yesterday we were amazed to discover that there is a baobab at Kew! It grows under glass, and is so fast-growing it has to be pruned every year to stop it growing through the roof. My daughter was thrilled.

   

   That tall tree in the middle is a baobab! Photo: Daniel Case, Wikimedia.

6. In the desert zones of the conservatory, we saw lots of different species of succulents and cacti. In the Alpine House, we saw plants adapted to alpine environments. And in two different greenhouses we saw rainforest plants. We thought about all the differences between these plants and how they help the plants to survive in different environments. (My favourite: succulents sometimes have silvery ‘fur’ which both protects them from fierce sunlight, and keeps them warm on cold desert nights.)

7. The children collected curling Eucalyptus bark, a leaf that had decomposed so much that only the veins remained, and a furry flower bud which at first glance looked like it must be a type of mammal.

8. In the orchid exhibition, we admired Darwin’s orchid. Darwin saw it, but didn’t see it being pollinated. He hypothesised that there must be a moth with an incredibly long tongue, specially evolved to pollinate this strange-looking flower. And he was right! A species of hawk moth with a tongue nearly 30cm long is the only creature capable of pollinating the orchid.

   

   Thomas William Wood’s illustration of a moth pollinating the orchid. Via Wikimedia.

9. In the rockery, which we had never visited before, we learnt that the bell-like flowers of stinking hellebores are a favourite with queen bumblebees when they first emerge in late winter/early spring. Yeasts in the nectar ferment the sugars, producing heat. This means the temperature inside a flower can be 2 degrees warmer than the air temperature, providing extra warmth for the queens. I explained to the children that this is the same process that makes a rising loaf of bread feel warm.

10. I discovered that it is possible to spend an entire day out of the house without spending any money. I loaded the rucksack with food and early in the day told the children I wasn’t buying them any more until the food we’d brought was gone. Success! (Do you want to know what we took? Sandwiches on homemade bread, homemade cakes and biscuits [the kitchen and I have worked hard this week, and we look it], nuts, dried prunes, fresh fruit, water.)

11. I also learnt that it is always worth taking your own book, even though you don’t want the extra weight in the rucksack. The children read their books all the way to Kew and back, but I had decided to leave David Copperfield behind. Big mistake. The rucksack weighed a ton anyway; 700 pages of Dickens would have been neither here nor there and I would have been able to find out how that horrible creep Uriah Heep gets his comeuppance. (I really hope he gets some comeuppance. No spoilers, please!).

After we got home from Kew I had to take my daughter to Cubs in the evening, so it was a very long day. Today we’re all tired, so we’ve cast our usual list aside and instead we’re diving in to some of the topics we explored yesterday.

• We read about alpine plants, cacti, rainforests and orchids in Botanicum, and lemurs and chameleons from Madagascar in Animal Atlas, and the children each found Madagascar on the map.

• We watched the first episode of David Attenborough’s Madagascar, which is a fascinating exploration of geology, evolution, habitats, and natural history. I’m on a mission to find a wonderful children’s book about this incredible island. Recommendations welcome!

Kew Gardens is the only annual membership we have. Yesterday I told the children that it expires in about a month, and asked them how often they’d like to visit between now and then. Their answer: Every day. (It takes us an hour to get there so this would be quite a commitment!) I have really loved going back at different times of the year, and there are still bits of it that we haven’t explored.

Personally, I do think Kew could up their game when it comes to education. In the Princess of Wales Conservatory, for example, I’d love maps showing where in the world you can find tropical rainforest, or temperate ferns, and information about what exactly qualifies a region as desert or savannah or scrubland. I did discover yesterday that there are kids backpacks available with learning resources inside. You have to book in advance, and there are options for 3-7 years and 7+. We haven’t tried them but I’ll try to remember to book before our next visit.

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Menu planning for people who are allergic to menu planning

Far be it from me to advise anyone on matters domestic, but here goes anyway.

I am hopeless at menu planning. Trying to plan all the meals we eat in a week is far too overwhelming for me, and homeschooling families eat a lot of meals! On the very rare occasions I manage it, I get very frustrated when we have an unexpected meal out or things don’t go to plan and we fail to cook/eat one of the scheduled meals.

But, I also hate getting to 7pm with no idea of what we’re going to eat, and discovering we’ve run out of onions, and especially the waste involved in buying something, spending two days wondering what to do with it, forgetting about it, and then being forced to confront your lack of forethought when the fridge starts to smell too bad to ignore.

Recently I have found a compromise that is working nicely. I don’t plan every meal, but I list down two or three lunches, and two or three suppers to cook during the week. This gives me enough predictability, but also enough flexibility. There are usually leftovers for in-between days or for the freezer. It makes me feel much more in control, without going to the Lazy Genius’s extreme of planning every dinner for the next three months. The very idea of that makes my head spin. If you, like me, suffer with this particular domestic challenge, give it a go!

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