Queen’s Park Botanical Gardens Glasshouse

Just along from the flat is Queen’s Park. Not being a south sider till recently, it’s not somewhere that I’ve spent a lot of time in the past. Now, it’s almost a daily routine to end up in the park at somepoint – whether it’s for a walk, a run, or just to have a meandering explore. I’m especially fond of the flag pole that has no flag on it, sitting at the top of the hill.

Not sure I’d tackle cycling this particular hill with quite so much gusto though… It’s steeper than it looks.

One of the buildings that we kept passing by on our jaunts was the Queen’s Park Glasshouse. It always seemed to be closed, or about to close, when we were thinking about going on a whim before. For some reason, it shuts at a weird time like 3.07pm on some days.

Okay, maybe not quite, but 3pm is still unusually early… especially if you don’t get up before 11am.

We managed to make a special effort on this particular day to get up in time to actually go and see what was going on. Botanic gardens are always cool places (no irony intended), and I was interested to see how this place compared to the West End’s Kibble palace, which is worth visiting purely on the strength of the name alone.

I adore the word ‘succulents’. Go on, say it aloud… succulents.

‘Succubus’ is pretty good too.

When me and Grace first met, we talked about a shared love of cacti. For me, it’s the only plant I’ve been known to manage to keep alive effectively (although I’ve given killing a few off a damn good attempt), and for her she used to go to a cacti shop in Denver after imbibing in a few sherries to buy lots of spiky plants.

Here we are, displaying our love for the critters:

Saying that, I’ve had cactus as a taco filling, pizza topping, and as the constituent part of a corn tortilla wrap… none of which have been all that great. It probably shouldn’t be too surprising, given that they go to such lengths to keep people away from them.

The glasshouse itself is pretty small, with the areas you can visit limited. Most of the bits seem to be used for cultivating plants and… well… doing planty things.

There were some pretty cool wee bits though, including a whole section hidden away with wee beasts that need heat lamps.

Oh no! This turtle has been flipped over and can’t get back up!

Don’t worry though. His pals helped.

I could easily have flipped the order of those two pictures to make it look like he was fine, and then the other turtles overturned the single one in some sort of attempted murder scenario. I didn’t though, because I’m not that sort of guy. Or did I? I guess that’s one mystery that you’ll just need to live with.