Last outings - Kew Gardens
On a mildly sunny Saturday just before exams, I set out for the far southeast corner of London where the gardens and forest reserves of kings and queens past are now laid out in the vast and grassy tract known as Kew Gardens. The entirety of Kew Gardens is too much to see in one day or even a few days, but I set out with a map and a planned route around the various attractions that I promptly forgot about in favor of a prolonged meander along forest and glade and the more formal gardens of roses and lilies and rhododendrons.
Where the gardens were once the playground of the royalty - a place where the nobility could go to escape the dreadful humidity of London in the summertime and amuse themselves among the idyllic cottages and miniature zoos bursting with exotic animals - the gardens are now a repository for rare plant species both domestic and imported, which are nurtured and bred in the confines of protected greenhouses and gardens. Some of these are kept for display and conservation at Kew, but many other specimens are sent back to their homelands in which they are now rare, largely for the purpose of re-seeding endangered territories with authentic (albeit well-traveled) flora. (The location also bears the somewhat dubious distinction of being so close to Heathrow that the noise of the jets above is sometimes so loud as to drown out conversation, and one can watch the landing gear emerge from the belly of the aircraft and lock into place on their final descent into the English countryside.)
In one of the grand glass-and-steel Victorian greenhouses, tropical plants of all heights and girths wrap their way up toward the ceiling a couple dozen meters above. Below the canopy layer, low-lying herbaceous plants climb into the filtered light from above. And off in one nondescript corner an interpretive sign commemorates a pretty but unassuming little plant with purplish-pink flowers that you might just as easily walk right by among such a profusion of tropical color. This shrubby little specimen is the Madagascar periwinkle. If you boil down a hefty quantity the various stems and leaves and flowers, and if you cook them just right through distillers and condensers and other sundry toys you'll find in any organic chemistry lab, you might get a tiny droplet of a powerful substance that somewhere, some time in the last four or five decades, someone purified and altered and cooked down until it was in a reasonably unadulterated form. And then this anonymous someone got the whimsical idea to give the resulting concoction to patients with blood cancers - leukemia, lymphoma, and the like. Now the derivatives of this little figment of tropical island flora are known as the vinca alkaloids - vincristine and vinblastine - that are still among the most potent drugs used today against those cancers. If I remember right, one of these was among the many compounds that the doctors in Ohio used on my niece to drag her stubbornly persistent leukemia into remission this spring before her bone marrow transplant.
Which brings me, in a round-about way, to the reason why I'm headed back across the ocean so soon: my niece - my brother's elder child - is now a couple of weeks into her bone marrow transplant but has become very ill. So far as the doctors can tell, the transplant was successful and the cancer is gone. But somewhere between the radiation and the chemotherapy and the rapid growth of the new marrow, she has been left with a diffuse lung injury that is requiring intensive support and an expansive regimen of drugs to prop up her ailing physiology while the lungs heal from damage already done. My travel plans have been quickly altered to include a several-day stop through Ohio to see the family there and spend some time at my niece's bed-side before I move on across the country toward the west coast, via the bay area, and eventually to Portland.
But on this day, I simply enjoy a quiet outing to the park to walk among forested paths older than most American states, and raise a to glass of some not-quite-alcoholic brew to the quaint old gardens and forested grottos of one of Britain's most famous picnic spots - Kew Gardens.
Where the gardens were once the playground of the royalty - a place where the nobility could go to escape the dreadful humidity of London in the summertime and amuse themselves among the idyllic cottages and miniature zoos bursting with exotic animals - the gardens are now a repository for rare plant species both domestic and imported, which are nurtured and bred in the confines of protected greenhouses and gardens. Some of these are kept for display and conservation at Kew, but many other specimens are sent back to their homelands in which they are now rare, largely for the purpose of re-seeding endangered territories with authentic (albeit well-traveled) flora. (The location also bears the somewhat dubious distinction of being so close to Heathrow that the noise of the jets above is sometimes so loud as to drown out conversation, and one can watch the landing gear emerge from the belly of the aircraft and lock into place on their final descent into the English countryside.)
In one of the grand glass-and-steel Victorian greenhouses, tropical plants of all heights and girths wrap their way up toward the ceiling a couple dozen meters above. Below the canopy layer, low-lying herbaceous plants climb into the filtered light from above. And off in one nondescript corner an interpretive sign commemorates a pretty but unassuming little plant with purplish-pink flowers that you might just as easily walk right by among such a profusion of tropical color. This shrubby little specimen is the Madagascar periwinkle. If you boil down a hefty quantity the various stems and leaves and flowers, and if you cook them just right through distillers and condensers and other sundry toys you'll find in any organic chemistry lab, you might get a tiny droplet of a powerful substance that somewhere, some time in the last four or five decades, someone purified and altered and cooked down until it was in a reasonably unadulterated form. And then this anonymous someone got the whimsical idea to give the resulting concoction to patients with blood cancers - leukemia, lymphoma, and the like. Now the derivatives of this little figment of tropical island flora are known as the vinca alkaloids - vincristine and vinblastine - that are still among the most potent drugs used today against those cancers. If I remember right, one of these was among the many compounds that the doctors in Ohio used on my niece to drag her stubbornly persistent leukemia into remission this spring before her bone marrow transplant.
Which brings me, in a round-about way, to the reason why I'm headed back across the ocean so soon: my niece - my brother's elder child - is now a couple of weeks into her bone marrow transplant but has become very ill. So far as the doctors can tell, the transplant was successful and the cancer is gone. But somewhere between the radiation and the chemotherapy and the rapid growth of the new marrow, she has been left with a diffuse lung injury that is requiring intensive support and an expansive regimen of drugs to prop up her ailing physiology while the lungs heal from damage already done. My travel plans have been quickly altered to include a several-day stop through Ohio to see the family there and spend some time at my niece's bed-side before I move on across the country toward the west coast, via the bay area, and eventually to Portland.
But on this day, I simply enjoy a quiet outing to the park to walk among forested paths older than most American states, and raise a to glass of some not-quite-alcoholic brew to the quaint old gardens and forested grottos of one of Britain's most famous picnic spots - Kew Gardens.
posted by skylanda at 10:00 AM
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