The Queen Elizabeth II Garden

The Queen Elizabeth II Garden opened yesterday in the heart of Regent's Park. [7 photos] It's two acres of royal tribute on the site of some former glasshouses. It looks both to the past and to the future. It's very nicely done if not yet at its finest. And if you turned up early enough yesterday they gave you a free souvenir booklet to tell you what you were looking at. I shall be quoting from it during what follows using regal purple text, just so you don't think I wrote those bits. On Day 1 a queue formed outside and only one entrance was unlocked, but the long term intention is that all four gates will be open and anyone can wander through, just like any other corner of the park. This is where all the shrubs for the Royal Parks used to be grown until the nursery moved to Hyde Park in 2018. This left a brownfield site with considerable potential so a plan was hatched to create an amazing garden to celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee. But following her death it became a…