Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park

This is our backyard.

Okay.

I’m exaggerating.

It’s an eight minute walk.

It’s called Primrose Hill and it’s beautiful.

Right below Primrose Hill is Regent’s Park. Home to the usual English park contingent of football fields, ponds, structured gardens etc – it also has unique features like an open-air theatre, a canal (otherwise known as Little Venice), the London Zoo, and a heronry (more on that at the end). It is an absolutely huge, beautiful and varied park. Particularly famous for the quantity and variety of its rose garden, Queen Mary’s gardens are whimsical and beautiful even at this time of year. Although we cannot wait for the roses to bloom…. right now the rose bushes are naked - plots of brown limbs awaiting pink, white and red adornment in the coming months.

If they are as pretty as this tree, then I will come see them every day. And seeing as it’s only a 15 minute walk from our front door, that seems like the perfect aesthetically-pleasing exercise plan.

I would show you more pictures of Regent’s Park. But if you’ve seen The King’s Speech then you’ve seen a famous part of it - the “Boardwalk.” A pebble strewn avenue lined by perfectly pruned trees with pathways leading off every so often to copious groupings of statues, fountains, and stately just-now-budding trees. This is where Bertie (King George VI) and the “Doctor” were walking when they had that violent row (argument). Even if you haven’t seen The King’s Speech (in which case, stop reading right now and get thee to a movie theater while you still have time!) you can just goggle-image Regent’s Park and you get the idea. Besides what I have to share with you next is so much more entertaining.

So we were checking out the tennis courts in Regent’s Park. (There are about a dozen perfect courts. This is the city where they hold Wimbledon after all.) We did a circular route around all the courts that took us through this obviously infrequently-visited back garden area. And we stumbled upon this:

Yah, that’s a little old stooped-back lady feeding bread to this:

There were two of them, plus some other birds and squirrels and they were loving her bread tosses. The herons would tumble forward on their awkward long legs and peck it up quickly from where she had thrown it a few inches away from her feet, and then quickly retreat. It would have been endearing if not for the fact that I know bread is awful for birds, and because the squirrels were so emboldened by her intimate feeding techniques that they scrambled right up to my feet and I had to effect a hasty retreat myself!

A parting note…. I can’t wait for summer, and some “Ice Cream” !