Orchid Festival at Kew Gardens
March is definitely shaping up to be an excellent month for taking in nature for me! Yesterday I headed across London to Kew Gardens with my pal Natelle to take in the annual orchid festival.
We arrived at Kew Gardens station just after 10 but as I haven't been in a few years I forgot we had to walk up and over the train tracks for the most direct route to Kew! We ended up walking around some of the pretty streets in the area instead, ending up at the Victoria Gate on the other side of the gardens. But as it was so lovely last week a lot of the magnolia trees have started blooming which did make for pretty photos!
Once we got inside the gardens we wandered over to the orchid festival at the Princess of Wales conservatory - I always love the desert terrain section that you go through first with all the cacti and succulents. This year's theme for the orchid festival was Columbia and it was a glorious riot of colour and flowers everywhere we looked. 
Then of course, the main attraction is always the big pond in the main tropical section. The staff at Kew always make animals out of the flowers and various plants which I always think are a nice touch! This year we spotted spoonbills, a sloth, a turtle and even a tapir formed out of pussywillow branches just to name a few!
The orchids were of course the main highlight. There were so many different colours and shapes - I found it so interesting especially as some of the flowers aren't what I would have immediately known were orchids!
Walking the whole exhibit took us just under 2 hours - it's definitely something that you can't rush! And of course we were snapping photos along the way as we went! Afterwards we decided to take a walk around the gardens and stopped in a few more galleries. We met tons of geese and two very graceful swans who definitely thought we were going to feed them and walked through the redwood section of the gardens which I had never seen before.
All in all it was an excellent day being out and about in nature and I feel super rejuvenated after it! The orchid festival runs until Sunday 10th of March this year and I'm already looking forward to seeing it next year!