A Long Weekend in London
The three Bazilchuks in the family conspired to go to London for a week and meet our friends Phoebe (in the middle above) and Jane (Phoebe's mom) from Vermont. Rick couldn't take the whole week off but took a four-day weekend at the beginning of the week. Since the Bazilchuks had the run of London for the rest of the week, Rick got to set the priorities for the first few days. First stop: the legendary Royal Botanical Gardens (or Kew Gardens), a mecca for botanists of all stripes. Consequently, the rest of this page is more about plants than people.
Here is the amazing Victoria water lily, with floating leaves over 1 m in diameter. Its natural home is the Amazon River basin. That's Jane on the left, and Nancy right next to her.
This leaf has been turned over to show the strengthening ribs on the underside. Rumor has it that the leaves can float a small child.
Here is Zoe standing next to the leaf stalk of a titan arum or corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum). That's right, it's a single leaf that can be over 5 meters tall. The stem is a gigantic underground corm that takes up most of the pot. After producing one or two leaves, one at a time, the plant will produce the world's largest inflorescence, up to 3 m tall. For better or worse -- it is pollinated by carrion flies and stinks of rotting meat -- it wasn't flowering when we were there, but here is a web site with some pictures. Maybe next time.
A cobra lily, an insectivorous plant closely related to the pitcher plants that grow in Vermont bogs.
And finally, the strange stone plants from the deserts of southern Africa. What you see are two swollen, succulent leaves. These are translucent on the top, allowing light to penetrate deep into the leaf where the photosynthetic cells are.