The gardens’ gift shop has plenty to satisfy my chocolate craving
There is a photo in the family album, of me aged six or seven, wearing yellow shorts, crouched down on the lawn in front of the Palm House at Kew Gardens. Not long after, my parents bought a café and became self-employed, and we hardly had a weekend off together again. I’ve never been back since.
Thus it was that I was heady with excitement to re-visit, this time with my eldest, and the Palm House was the first place we went into. It’s a hot ’n’ sticky place (not a venue for a first date) and in among the endangered plants and ‘possibly the biggest pot plant in the world’ was the cacao tree. Although this was not a place to eat chocolate.