SPRINGTIME IN LONDON: A Walk in Hyde Park

Cherry trees in bloom, Hyde Park, London.

Londoners know that it is spring when the lawns of Hyde Park suddenly turn green, daffodils and lupins emerge from the ground, and cherry trees burst into bloom. On our recent trip to London in late April, the weather was cool and sunny—a perfect time for a walk in the park, a short distance from our hotel in South Kensington.

Viburnum.

Narcissus.

We entered the park at the gate near the Serpentine Gallery and followed the walking path toward the Albert Memorial. The park is huge with separate paths for walkers, bikers, and horses. It was not hard to imagine one of the characters from the Forsyte Saga trotting by on horseback.

Sports lawn.

Large lawns and open spaces provide places for picnics, sports, and for dogs to romp. Benches are frequent and a place to rest and enjoy the view.

Cherry blossoms carpet the ground.

Everywhere we looked there were flowers in bloom. The pink blossoms of the cherry trees were at their peak--on the trees and carpeting the ground. In 2019 Japan sent 125 cherry trees to England as a gift symbolizing friendship and cultural ties.

Bluebells with bee.

I spotted a bee collecting nectar from the bluebells next to the path. The next day, on a trip to visit a friend who lives just outside London, we took a walk in the woods and saw hundreds of bluebells in broad patches on the forest floor.

Bluebells on the forest floor in the town of St. Albans.

Albert Memorial.

The Albert Memorial in Hyde Park is hard to miss with its golden spire reaching 176 feet into the sky. A statue of Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, sits inside the pavilion. After Albert died in 1861 at the age of 42, Queen Victoria had the monument erected in his memory. She lived another forty years!

Corner sculpture of the Albert Memorial symbolizing Europe.

Every feature of the structure is significant. At the four corners around the pavilion are large allegorical sculptures representing the arts and sciences and continents.

Albert Hall.

And across the street from the Albert Memorial is Albert Hall, London’s premiere concert hall. It was officially opened by Queen Victoria in 1871.

Mexican Orange Blossom bush.

Our walk gave us just a small taste of what Hyde Park has to offer. We didn’t have the time or energy to do more--it was our first day in London after a very long plane ride from Los Angeles. On a future trip I’d like to see the Peter Pan statue, the Speaker’s Corner, and Serpentine Lake.

SPRING WILDFLOWERS AND PONIES IN ENGLAND’S NEW FOREST, Guest Post by Susan Kean

Spring violets, the New Forest, England

My friend Susan Kean, an excellent photographer, recently visited the New Forest in England, when wildflowers were everywhere and new foals were frolicking in the meadows. She has graciously agreed to share some of her photographs with The Intrepid Tourist.

Meadows like this one in the New Forest are places where meadowlarks and other creatures can survive.

My favorite flower, the cowslip. They have an incredible smell.

The New Forest is one of the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed pasture land, heathland and forest in Southern England, covering southwest Hampshire and southeast Wiltshire. It was proclaimed a royal forest by William the Conqueror, featuring in the Domesday Book.

Acres of bluebells.

Susan writes: The bluebell seems to be England’s answer to the California poppy. They grow in surprising places but things have to just right for them to thrive.

Acres of gorse in New Forest.

No visit to the New Forest is complete without pony pictures. Local people (commoners, that is, people who own part of the Common land) are free to graze their animals in the New Forest. This came from the time when King William I, around 1100, established the forest as a royal hunting preserve and the people who lived there were not allowed to fence their properties. They were, however, granted rights to let their animals graze freely. Those rights are still in place today!

New Forest ponies.

Even a wet day in the New Forest was great for pony watching. There were lots of young foals. 

Mother and foal.

This foal was very curious about me but mom kept an eye on me. Baby foal would have come right up to me but I decided Mom might not trust me and could give me a hard kick. So I moved away.

Even ponies have to chase after their children sometimes.

For more about sightseeing in Hampshire, see Anita Withrington's guest post about the Alice in Wonderland topiary at the Hampshire Gardens and the National Motor Museum (Feb 26, 2023).

Bluebells, New Forest.

GETTING TO KNOW GREENLAND - PART 1: NARSARSUAQ Guest Post by Caroline Hatton

From the plane: the Greenland Ice Sheet, glaciers, and lakes with clear blue to milky beige waters.

My friend and fellow children’s book author Caroline Hatton and her husband Bill visited Greenland in July 2019. She took all the photos in this post.

Ever since I first saw Greenland from the air, as a teen tourist flying with my parents from home in Paris to New York, I’ve dreamed of visiting this world of snow and ice and mountains with unknown names. Half a century later, I decided to go to Greenland before global warming makes it “all melt away.” Considering the headlines about the June 2019 Greenland IceSheet record melting spike, I hoped July 2019 wasn’t “two weeks too late…”

What should we see and do? We found no tour books. Old Iceland tour books had only a paragraph about Greenland. With insufficient info online, choosing destinations was too hard.

What does the landscape look like? Are there hiking trails or maps? How many days should we spend in each place? In the end, my husband picked a packaged tour, a sampler combining a Viking archeological site, icebergs, the midnight sun, history, culture, cuisine, and free time for hiking. The package included flights to three towns, “one with a name that starts with an N,” Bill said, “the capital, and one that starts with an I,” my first clue that Greenlandic is a challenge.

Flying from Reykjavik, Iceland, to Narsarsuaq, Greenland. Image courtesy of NASA, with red added.

We flew 2 h 20 min from Reykjavik, Iceland, to Narsarsuaq in South Greenland.

Greenlandic Bluebells (Campanula gieseckiana ssp. groenlandica)

I found Greenland phenomenal because of the enormous size and fluorescent blooms of its Greenlandic Bluebells (Campanula gieseckiana ssp. groenlandica), the myriad shapes and shades of blue of its waters in fjords and glacial lagoons and icecap meltwater lakes, and… the ferocity of its mosquitoes.

Former World War II movie theater. Marlene Dietrich sang there in person.

Narsarsuaq is a former World War II U.S. military airbase. It was needed as a refueling stop for planes headed for battle in Europe. American soldiers wounded in Europe received care at the base hospital on their way home. The Narsarsuaq Museum tells the story with roomfuls of photographs, news articles, documents, correspondence, military and medical paraphernalia, and every-day objects. The runway and some original buildings still exist.

This is Narsarsuaq: a runway, a hotel, a supermarket, a museum, a one-room school, four places to eat, and a tiny harbor (not in photo)... Across the fjord, the current sheep farming settlement, Qassiarsuq, and Erik the Red’s Viking ruins.

A 15-minute boat ride across the fjord is the Viking archeological site of Erik the Red’s farm, Brattahlíð, which is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The most substantial Viking ruins at this site: the wall stones of a Christian church, inside a turf fence. Other stones are still aligned where house and barns once stood. Nearby replicas of a long house and of an earlier, minuscule church are open to visitors.

Erik the Red came from Iceland in 982 and later established a Norse colony in what he named Greenland to attract more settlers. South Greenland truly was and still is heavenly green.

After more than 400 years in Greenland, the Vikings abandoned their settlements, but not until after the Thule ancestors of modern Inuits had arrived. Then the area became uninhabited again for roughly 300 years, before sheep farming restarted and continued until now. This history is summarized by tour guides and at the Narsarsuaq Museum.

The only musk ox we saw was on an appetizer at the Hotel Narsarsuaq restaurant—dark, dried, and shredded atop raw scallops. Edible wildflowers were picked outside the hotel and kept fresh with crushed ice: a purple Greenlandic Bluebell (Campanula gieseckiana ssp. groenlandica), pink Dwarf Fireweed (Chamaenerion latifolium), and yellow Greenland Buttercups (Ranunculus auricomus).

Today, guides lead visitors on foot or by boat or helicopter, to the Inland Ice (Greenland Ice Sheet), glaciers, icebergs, viewpoints, nearby towns, villages, tiny settlements, or more Viking ruins. Seeing musk ox, a wild and woolly beast of the Arctic looking bovine but related to sheep, would have been cool. But we would have had to research where locals might have seen some, then hire a guide and a boat for a day… at a phenomenal cost.

Permanent nylon ropes helped us climb a rocky slope.

Instead, we took a photo of the trail map hanging in the hotel lobby and went hiking past the ruin of the World War II hospital, through Flower Valley, and up to one of several small lakes.

Kiattuut Sermiat, an average backyard glacier, as seen from the trail

We loved the exercise, the scenery, and our mosquito-net jackets and headwear. Taking each photo two or three times was enough to get one without mosquitoes parked on the camera lens, creating big blurry blotches.

At the Polar-Tut Café: imagine thumping music.

For dinner at the Polar-Tut Café, we ordered from the menu board, handwritten in English and Danish, the second language taught in school (because Greenland is a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark). Reje burger is Danish for shrimp burger, shrimp and fish being the top Greenlandic exports. Local Qajaq beer on tap came in three shades: Doppelbock, Pilsner, and Dunkel.

After three richly satisfying days in Narsarsuaq, we flew up the west coast to the capital, Nuuk (pronounced nuke). There are no roads between towns in Greenland, so people get around by boat or plane. Clear skies made flightseeing a highlight of our trip.

For more info

Extreme melting in Greenland is not the only problem due to climate change: huge Arctic wildfires burned there and in Siberia, Scandinavia, and Alaska.

A U.S. World War II veteran pilot’s dramatic personal account of flying through Narsarsuaq