Blue Dot - the garden shed and the galaxy garden

At Blue Dot we picked a camping option called a space pod. We turned up and they were "solar powered" garden sheds (supplemented by one car battery per row of pods) with sleeping shelves. More gnome house than glamping, but an amazing view!

One of the things I was very excited to see was Chris Beardshaw's Galaxy Garden. This is a permanent version of the conceptual show gardens you see at events like Hampton Court, and this one is a science garden based on how the universe got from the Big Bang to our present day, using a pattern of circular gardens. We went there after dark first, and then on Sunday morning, when my devices had all run out of battery, and Chris Beardshaw has sadly retired it from his website, so its presence online is confined to a lovely blog post here and there. It's huge - spirals of willow, grass, stones, firecracker planting in colours hot or cool depending on where we are in the development of the universe. There are mazy twisty bits to lose children in and a huge scooped slope to relax on, tactile grasses and poetic notices explaining what each garden represents, and all around an enclosing hedge that keeps everything sheltered and warm.

The gardens were lumiered and full of performances by night, and by day full of talks, random yoga classes and science demonstrations. The arboretum there holds two national collections, so the trees themselves were amazing even before they lit up in rainbow colours after dark. And over everything, the telescope, white by day and multicoloured by night.

We're back from Blue Dot now, and we have a kitten. The two are not related, except for sequentially.