Who would have thought that camping in London
could be nice and even safe ?
And a bit noisy, oh yes..
Around the City there are 5 campings.
The one where I stayed,
in Chertsey, was founded in the early 1900th century!
Maybe they didn't have these lovely caravans , yet..
the purpose of my adventure was to attend a talk
at the Economic Botany Collection,
inside the beautiful scenery of Kew Gardens.
Mark, the Curator, was so helpful and gave us many information
about the collection held there
as a result of Centuries of research, expeditions
and collectors' donations
that still happen
Some of the boxes still have their original packages!
I couldn't resist to photograph the system
to store so many items in a small building,
using this sliding doors that reveal to be cupboards
with thousands of shelves.
This is the Caribbean lacebark collected in Jamaica,
where the lacy structure
comes out naturally from the bark
It was exploited by our western
great sense of commerce,
and now it is a very rare plant which is difficult to re-establish...
This bonnet was just made with lacebark and ribbon..isn't it amazing?
We attended as well talk about Indigo,
by the lovely Jenny Balfour-Paul
an interesting trip
in her researches which started in the nineties,
when the interest about Indigo was
only for antropologists,
more then for artists and textile designers...
Above some dried leaves od Indigo plant ( Indigofera Tinctoria ),
and a block of the dried powder
which was used to be pressed for practical storage.
Jenny told us that many different parts of the planet and their populations
used to extract blue from different plants,
but the interesting thing is
that these plants all had the indigo molecules inside.
So the blue, basically, was one for all of them.
In the next post
I hope to show you some of the beauty of the Gardens,
which I
had to explore even if the time was so short!
I 'd rather had run in them , than miss the opportunity!!
Image credit: Hallie Rose Taylor
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