Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens excursion

There is a Kenilworth in Cape Town too. I don't recall that they have any gardens though, and even less likely - aquatic gardens. We managed to get all the house-mates dressed, fed and sunblocked in an hour and bundled into the car to drive up to NE DC. Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens is apparently the best thing to do in August in DC. This is quite a claim as there really are MANY things to do in DC, in any month. The gardens completely met my expectations! Mostly because I have never seen plants such as these!

August is when the lotuses bloom. I always imagined that Lotuses were like lillies, floating peacfully on the surface, reflecting their colours off the mirror of the water. These lotuses however were astonishingly different. Their leaves are huge, like elephant ears, as one of the house-mates commented, waxy and rough to the touch. The flowers are Giants as big as my head when they are open fully, and the buds are like massive artichokes, but beautifully pink and red. The leaves, flowers and buds are all appended on the end of a long, rubbery and solid stem, which brings them up out of the water, high up above the heads of visitors to the gardens.

The most remarkable feature for me were the seed pods. I had seen them in specialty shops that sell incense and potpourri, but never known what they were. They grow up out of the center of the flower, starting as an emerald green and then drying out to dirty brown. At first glance it looks like an old-fashioned shower head, with the seeds sticking out of many little holes. The holes slowly expand as the pod dries and shrivels and that allows the seeds to drop out, falling 5 feet into the water below.

Kenilworth in DC has certainly given me an experience that Kenilworth in Cape Town never did. Although I hear they have some protected marshlands in the center of the race track. I doubt that you would see people wondering around there with their mouths in a constant 'O' of wonder at the spectacular behemoths nodding above them.

**Forthcoming attraction: photo's