Every year Kew Gardens holds what they call their Tropical Extravaganza, which is basically an excuse to dress up the Princess of Wales Conservatory with hundreds of orchids, and other exotic flowers and foliage. There’s no pretence about the show being to exhibit botanically unusual or rare plants but to put on a wild show of colour in the middle of winter.

An entrance of pure Orchids. It took a while to get a clear shot as everyone else was getting in the way!

Unfortunately many of the orchids were not named, but some of them were. Where we were able to identify a plant the names are added below, hopefully we have the correct name with the correct plant.

Given the cold weather outside it was a very welcome break when Mark and I entered the glasshouse, the warmth of the heat and warmth of the displays was quite a nice lift. I have to be honest that this style of exotic planting is not what we would want to recreate at home, its a bit over the top, and in places reminded us of the wedding arches you see from Beach weddings. Nice for someone else but not for usHowever that said, the overall impact was impressive, and the colour and vibrancy of the individual plants were like sweets in an old fashioned sweet shop, and like the proverbial kid in a sweet shop we dashed from one to another. Perhaps that’s exaggerating a little bit here, but we certainly spent our time admiring many of the individual blooms as well as the overall effect. Its fair to say that some of these blooms are somewhat brash, but many have a real delicate nature to them.