Going down to Kew in daffodil time

When spring finally reached London after those Arctic weeks with the bitter wind from the east, I hurried out to Kew to see what was happening to Nature. And there it all was: millions of daffodils in massed marching ranks, spreading golden carpets between the still bare specimen trees. The crocuses broke ‘like fire’ at my feet, as Tennyson says, and the magnolia blossoms were bursting on the trees with all the pent-up energy stored during the long, cold winter months: an extravaganza in ivory.

But first I looked in at the parish church of St Anne on Kew Green. It is one of my favourite churches because it has expanded from a tiny box, built as a chapel in 1714, being added to or embellished on no fewer than ten occasions, the latest being in 1988. Yet all these extensions or alterations are entirely congruous with the original concept in multicoloured brick, so you’d think it was built all of a piece.