London Day 7 - Kew Gardens

2 days left!  I thought since it was a nice day, I'd take a trip down to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew.  This Botanical garden is home to more than 30,000 living specimens and has the largest live collection in the world.

I was more differnt bird species in those few hours than I had seen all week!  Though when you're in the city, not many birds you can see, I suppose.

 

 

And there are some amazing tree specimens there, like the Monkey Puzzle Tree, which is related to the Bunya Pine in Australia!  I wonder what its nuts would have looked like.

The Japanese part was nice, with the Pagoda and small shelter.

And how could I resist taking pictures of flowers in the Botanical Gardens?  Unfortunately there were no roses or azaleas in blossom, but there were lots of daffodils and rhododendrons, amongst others.

 

Then we wandered around the city and I took a few pictures of some of the many churches around the city.  I can see how you can get "churched" out in this place - there are 100 churches in the city alone.

I wanted to see Temple Church because it was in the book (and the movie) The Da Vinci Code.  This is the church of the Knight's Templar.  We couldn't go in because it was Good Friday and the church was not open to tourists, but I would have liked to see the effigies of the marble knights inside.

St Bride's is on Fleet Street, and thus was the church of journalists.  It was another Christopher Wren designed church (rebuilt after WWII) and is the second tallest church in London (behind St Paul's of course).  The steeple had been used as inspiration for wedding cakes.

St Stephen Walbrook church was another church rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire in 1666.

We went out dinner at Hawksmoor, a popular steak joint in London.  The back of the menu had some interesting facts!

We ordered 1.2kg Bone in Prime Rib and sides of Mushrooms, Sweet Potatoes and Beef Dripping Chips, and polished up our meal with Honeycomb Cheesecake and Chocolate Mousse.  Yum!!!!