Today was the day when the final chapter/conclusion of my book changed dramatically. It had been going to put fireflies and glowworms at the center - but I published a piece on them last year, and I wasn't particularly excited about going back to this material: I felt I'd said what I wanted to say. I'd always shied away from writing about bees, because are they really "overlooked"? Everyone loves bees (except when they sting them ...), surely? But Wolfgang Buttress's Hive is extraordinary. To enter into it is to become a bee, in that one's inside a hive - the small world being made huge, oneself diminished to the size of a worker bee (cue for all those Victorian parables about social organization), and one's in the middle of sound - music that is performed (like the thousand of LED lights inside the hive that glow on and off) in time with the vibrations of the garden's bees (in the key of C- Who knew that bees buzzed in C-?). It really does ... an accelerometer (a vibration sensor) sits inside a beehive at Kew, and it picks up the bees' vibrations in real time, and sends them off to the installation: these trigger the lights. And they also trigger noise gates at particular thresholds, and that sets off sounds from a pre-recorded library created by musicians improvising to a feed of live bee sounds.
It sits on a small hillock, like a medieval tower on a tor; and it's surrounded by a wildflower meadow (given that it's No Mow May, it doesn't look that different from lots of front lawns ...).
And one can walk round it - it's 17 metres high (that's 55.77 feet),
or stand at the bottom and look up to the sky - or at people lying on their backs, immersed, on the middle floor.
It's also reminiscent of other cathedral-like structure that one can stand inside at Kew, from Weeping Beeches
to the eighteenth-century Ice Cave, with its amazing brickwork. I felt a rush of things to say coming on - and went off and scribbled a lot of notes while eating lunch from the incredibly sustainability-conscious Orangery cafeteria - including, would you believe, a Waste Knot rescue vegetable tart.
And there's also the Mark Quinn temporary installations scattered around. I can't say I've ever been a fan of his work - I particularly loathed the stuff at the 2013 Venice Biennale (remember that huge white inflatable figure called "Breath" on the island of San Georgio Maggiore, anyone?) - but these sculptures had a certain pull. But the thinking is so obvious. When we look at nature - we get ourselves reflected back to us! (that's so much not what I think, but I understand what he means, of course, and how that's reinforced by what happens when we take photographts of his shiny surfaces).
I did, though, quite like the ones buried deep in the foliage of the Temperate House (though not his huge Bonsai sculptures);
and there was an indoor show that featured work he's done in collaboration with the Herbarium, as well as some of his freeze dried pieces, and his reflections about how we - whether a plant cell or a human - all basically share the same DNA.
And, it being the middle of May, the rest of Kew was looking pretty spectacular, too - the roses, of course, but really everything else.
I spent some time in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, which I haven't visited for an age: the pics below are from there ...
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