Saturday Photo: The Palm House at Kew

As Patricia points out, botanical gardens and their green houses are marvelous places to escape from winter. Montreal's own Jardin botanique was a place where I took my kids when they were little on days when we just had to get out, but an afternoon in the snow seemed too much to comptemplate. A stroll around its glass houses was like a trip to the tropics or the desert, and we all came home much happier.

The seed was planted on those outings which led to my first non-fiction book Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens (Véhicule, 2001.) Doing the research on it took me to nine gardens around the world, and Patricia's comment set me thinking: maybe winter is a good time to pull out the pix I took then.

So here is the first one: the Palm House in the Royal Gardens at Kew, London. Completed in 1848, it was one of the first large glass houses constructed, and became a model for conservatories around the world.