Visiting the British Museum…

Wouldn’t you know it? I go to London and London is taking a trip to North America…

North American Landscape, Kew at the British Museum…“Travel up from the Florida swamps, through the Missouri prairie to the forests of New England and Canada – all without leaving London.” As you can see from the photos this was one of the very rainy days during our time in London, so my journey through the North American landscape was brief.

I do love the Tulip tree…

And that’s an impressive bog!

Unfortunately there were other parts of the exhibit that were also rather “bog like”…

I think more than one person almost lost a shoe in that goo, it was time to go inside where it was dry.

Probably the most impressive thing I saw during my visit to the British Museum were the huge Assyrian relief panels dating from 700-600 BC (“ish,” I’m rounding here after all this is not a history blog). I could have stared at them for hours; and in fact another visitor was doing just that. He had brought a chair and would spend about 20 minutes setting in front of each panel before moving on to the next. He wasn't taking notes, sketching, or photographing, just spending time absorbing it all.

I have to admit after awhile I did start to get overwhelmed, so I decided to turn it into a bit of a game and started to photograph the interesting representations of trees, vines and other plants. I am a sucker for graphic plant shapes.

Aren’t they amazing?

A warning, these next few pictures might upset the sensitive animal lovers out there. But I found the way the sheer muscle and power of the lions was depicted to be breathtaking.

The dogs were pretty gorgeous too.

After the British Museum closed we stopped in a few used bookstores, I figured in a country as obsessed with gardening as England is I would be in garden book paradise. Not so much. The best selection was here, at the Oxfam bookstore near the British Museum.

I came away with Foliage Plants, by Christopher Lloyd and Tales of Old Time Gardening by M. Patricia Collard. All in all, it was a very good day.