Much missed - Supper Talks at the Chelsea Physic Garden with the Tangerine Dream Café

I often go to public talks, about all sorts of topics. One series that was a regular in my 'season' was the Supper Talks at the Chelsea Physic Garden (CPG), sadly no more. 

Here's a photo of the room the talks took place in upstairs (not my photo so haven't embedded it).

https://x.com/ChelsPhysicGdn/status/738431887576829952/photo/1 and you can find more tweets and images here.

Everything about this was utterly lovely and genteel - you got to hear someone talk about something interesting and eat something delicious. You could choose to have your supper before or after the talk (I always took the earlier sitting so that I could take the Thames Clipper ferry home to Greenwich afterwards; it runs from Cadogan Pier but there aren't many ferries after 9pm). Talk, nice food, ferry - just perfection in my book.

CPG is economic botany / ethnobotany heaven. It is a beautiful and interesting garden with areas for different kinds of plants that are used for different purposes (dyeing, food, medicine, clothing) with lovely little greenhouses and all sorts of interesting features. The shop is also wonderful and I had several happy snacks and suppers in the Tangerine Dream Café.

 

That café has now moved to the Ragged School in Poplar (the Ragged Café is on the 309 bus route, or a short walk from the 339 [2026: café is now FORNO]) but the Supper Talks at CPG seem to have stopped. The current café arrangement does run what look to be lovely supper events. Outside tables laden with deliciousness, but it's just eating not learning so I've never felt that tempted. I realised I'd not actually been to the gardens since 2018 (!) so I will have to remedy that soon, I suppose Covid didn't help.

In December 2018 lots of celebrities wrote to (then) Prince Charles asking him to save the Tangerine Dream Café which lost out to Rocket And Radish Ltd, there was a bit of a hoo ha about it and it made the Daily Mail: Stars plea to Charles to fight to save garden cafe under threat of closure.

Annoyingly, for the purposes of this post, I don't have a record of all the talks I attended but have managed to find some info about a few of them.

This page shows the current events at Chelsea Physic Garden.

4 October 2018
Supper talk: 'Captain Bligh & the Breadfruit'
"William Bligh (of ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ fame) undertook two remarkable Pacific voyages before 1800, transporting Breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies. A fascinating evening presented by Pieter Ban der Merwe, outlining the challenges and outcomes of these missions." 

I wasn't able to find the info on the Wayback Machine / Internet Archive but this snippet came via the Cadogan VIP magazine PDF.

They had some breadfruit at this talk and I rather enjoyed it - a bit like a very light pineapple.

4 October 2018 - sampling breadfruit at the Chelsea Physic Garden supper talk on Captain Bligh and the Breadfruit. Both of which I enjoyed.

 

4 October 2018 - possibly a very similar meal to the one below (I can see edamame beans in there) but I didn't make a note of the menu options.

Before I had supper and attended the talk I took a wander round the gift shop.

4 October 2018 - 1 of 3 - the shop at Chelsea Physic Garden

4 October 2018 - 2 of 3 - the shop at Chelsea Physic Garden

4 October 2018 - 3 of 3 - inside the Tangerine Dream Cafe at Chelsea Physic Garden with some lovely bunting

7 December 2017
‘Fashioned from Nature’ with Edwina Ehrman, Curator of Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum - all about clothing from natural fibres.

From my contemporaneous tweets - 

• "The best bleaching was in Haarlem" Nthlnds - rich folk would send linens there for a spruce up! (also area unpolluted)" 
• "Uncreasable and dye-absorbing linen seems to be the holy grail for textile mfrs. Now hearing about mythic linen-tweed mix" (mythic because original samples hard to get hold of) 
• "Drapers used to *explain* fabrics to their customers, highlighting things to look out for when buying. Harder w synthetics!" 
• "Cotton is v *environmentally* "hygroscopic". 6tn litres used in dying industry. Low-water finishing denim is an improvement" (may be an improvement!) 
• "+, cotton from US, shipped to Colombia for weaving, then to New York for printing. Zipping abt the globe in container ships" 
• "Learning about pineapple fibres which are used in a bonded not woven fabric (I might need to google that)" 
• "Also apparently people in the Balkans have been making alternative leather from mushrooms for *ages*(!)".
  

7 December 2017 - The tables in the garden were covered with the largest wreaths I've ever seen.

13 July 2017
Supper talk: ‘More than cotton: textile secrets of Kew’s Economic Botany Collection’ with Dr Mark Nesbitt, Curator, Economic Botany Collection Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Below is a photo I took of the supper I had on the night.

13 July 2017 - Goat’s cheese, gruyere and sun-dried tomato tarte (recipe link, Daily Mail link), edamame beans & green & yellow courgettes, plus feta, olive and watermelon, plus orange polenta cake & a glass of white.

4 August 2016
Scented Decadence with Dr. Christina Bradstreet
"Why did the scent of roses encapsulate the spirit of decadence in late nineteenth-century art? This talk explores the use and abuse of perfume and its pleasures and pains in scenes of fragrant intoxication."

You can see all the Chelsea Physic Garden Supper Talks for the 2016 summer and winter season here.

[NEW] She is also presenting "Watts' Choosing: talk and tour with Curator, Dr Christina Bradstreet" at the Watts Gallery (GU3 1DQ) near Guildford on Friday 11 July 2025 from 5.30 to 7pm.

11 Aug 2010
Chelsea Physic Garden talk: 'Hans Sloane, Quinine (Cinchona) & Malaria' by Prof Monique Simmonds. Technically not a 'supper talk' but the restaurant was open and there was a price given for the combined talk and food.

Sloane, Quinine and the Battle Against Malaria
"Chelsea Physic Garden has been growing cinchona (the source of quinine) since Sloane’s time. Professor Monique Simmonds who works at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, is an expert on ethnobotany and on the plants which have been used to combat this life-threatening disease."

2007 photo of large wooden box labelled Cinchona succirubra at University of Leiden (I was there doing a two-week course in Economic Botany - fab).

Other posts in the Much Missed series

• Somerset House and Film4's Summer Screen series of open air films in the courtyard (9 June 2022)
• The Bankside Frost Fair 2003 - 2008 (24 November 2020)
• Speechification, curated radio documentaries (9 January 2020)
• The National Geographic shop on Regent Street, London (4 January 2020)
• MOMI, London's Museum of the Moving Image (2 January 2014)

 

Tangerine Dream Café - as far as I can tell this began at the Chelsea Physic Garden in 2005 before moving to Brook Green in 2018, then became Café Tangerine at the Institut Francais in 2019 before moving to the Ragged School in Poplar (in 2023..?) and becoming the Ragged Café. 

Here's the Tangerine Dream café recipe for Goat’s cheese, gruyere and sun-dried tomato tarte (all Daily Mail links) also for Crunchy lemon cake  and Fig, thyme, almond and honey tart.

Botany talks: Monday evening lectures at Kew: KMIS - the Kew Mutual Improvement Society

These are worth going along to if you can get to Kew Gardens on Monday at 6pm. In fact, not the gardens bit as such but the Jodrell Theatre which is much nearer to Kew Bridge station (easy to get to from Waterloo) than to Kew station (both on underground and the overground).

They're a series of talks from September to April and have the wonderful air of the village flower show about them, all quite genteel and edifying. I mean that as a compliment!

One of the first ones I went to in 2007 (that's the link to the original listing there, on The Lecture List) was archaeobotanist Mark Nesbitt's talk on what you can glean about a society from its wheat (for example charred grains suggests a bit of cooking) and all sorts of fascinating things about wheat itself. Mark's since become a mate (we run the big ethnobotany group on Facebook) and through him I've found out about all sorts of fascinating events and courses such as botany for beginners at Kew and a two-week course in economic botany held in Leiden and run by David Mabberley. I recommend that course, it was wonderful. Plus Mark's told me about plenty of one-day events and film screenings and evening talks, some given by Mark himself.

Here's what Kew has to say about its own KMIS (Kew Mutual Improvement Society) lectures:

KMIS Horticultural Lecture Series

KMIS lectures run on Monday evenings from September - March each year, and are open to the general public. They cover a wide range of topics of horticultural and botanical interest.

The Kew Mutual Improvement Society was established in 1871 under the auspices of Joseph Dalton Hooker. The Society programmed a season of horticultural lectures for the benefit of student gardeners at Kew.

For some reason they've hidden the actual KMIS lecture listings in a PDF. Perhaps this is intentional and I am going to peeve them a bit by copying and pasting it here and giving it to Google to index and share more widely. Oops. Well obviously if they ask me to hide them again I shall, so make the most of the info while it's in the wild :)

Check out the nominative determinism there on 21 October.  And 28 October too, kinda ;)

Mondays 6pm
www.kew.org/kmis
Jodrell Lecture Theatre, RBG Kew
£2 entry. Schedule may be subject to change. See website

September 2013
23     Rocky mountain high – alpine plants of Colorado
Thomas McCarter (Kew Diploma Student)

30     Gardens in a royal landscape – the Savill and Valley Gardens in Windsor Great Park
Mark Flanagan (Keeper of the Gardens, Windsor Great Park)

October
07     Rethinking the lawn
Lionel Smith (PhD Researcher in Horticulture. University of Reading)

21     No-one knows about wild flowers anymore? Does it matter?
Charles Flower (Countryside restorer)

28     Exploring Britain’s native plant medicine – old wives’ tales or old and wise tales?
Lara Bean (Medical Herbalist)

November04     Floral treasures of eastern Turkey
Kit Strange (Kew alpine horticulturalist)

11     Giant tortoises and heterophyllous plants – the uncut story of Mauritius and Rodrigues
Amy Moffett (Kew Diploma Student)

18     Flower gardening and the natural world – a sideways look. And where is all the energy going?
Edward Green MBE (Founder member of theAncient Tree Forum. Conservation Consultant/
Writer/Broadcaster)

25     Greening Tokyo – urban planting in one of the world’s most densely populated cities
Suzanne Patman (Kew Diploma Student)

December
02     The restoration of Gravetye Manor
Tom Coward (Head Gardener)

09     Parks and plantings in southern Germany
Martin Deasy (Kew Diploma Student)

January 2014
13     New England salt marshes – plants and productivity
Susan Urpeth (Kew Diploma Student)

20     Victorian gardens
Brent Elliott (RHS Historian)

27     A beginners guide to the orchids of Malaya – hybridisation, urban restoration and cloud forest habitation
Thomas Freeth (Kew Diploma Student)

February
03     Forensic botany
Peter Gasson (Kew plant anatomist)

10     By elephant, rickshaw and Shanks’ pony – the long road to a Flora of Nepal
Mark Watson (Coordinator of the Major Floras Programme, R.B.G. Edinburgh)

17     The Yorkshire Arboretum – Kew’s partner in the north
John Grimshaw (Director of The Yorkshire Arboretum)

24     What have plants ever done for us?
Timothy Walker (Director of Oxford Botanic Garden and Harcourt Arboretum)

March
03      The ancient and diverse fungal-plant symbioses
Bryn Dentinger (Kew Head of Mycology)

April
14      Flora of Ecuador
Hans-Wilhelm Mackrodt (Kew Diploma Student)

21      Red listing and saving trees from extinction
Sara Oldfield (BGCI Secretary General)

The lectures are occasionally preceded by 'items of interest' from the audience - these can be delightfully random and I keep telling myself that one of these days I should rustle up a five minute talk on bere (pronounced 'bear') which is a type of barley, Hordeum vulgare. It grows in Orkney (one of my favourite places in the world) and may have been introduced there by Vikings in the 9th century and an awful lot has been written about it and its modern use in local food and beer, and emerging markets. While on that economic botany course I learned a fair bit about barley, malting and beer...

Some thoughts on herbal remedies and diabetes

A shortened link for this post is http://is.gd/aJEfH

Medicines from plants
There are many preparations containing plant ingredients which have been claimed to help people with diabetes manage their condition. As well as the sugars, proteins and fats (oils) that plants use for fuel, storage and building blocks, plants produce many other chemicals that protect them from being eaten (for example by herbivorous animals) and help in repairing damage. Many of these chemicals have effects (whether these are beneficial or negative is often be a consequence of dose, as much as of the nature of the molecule(s) involved) in humans and have for years been exploited in medicine.

Aspirin tablets contain a chemical which has its origin in a similar chemical found in the bark of the willow tree (Salix alba) and in the woody shrub known in North America as meadowsweet (from the Spiraea family). Similarly metformin, used in the treatment of Type 2 diabetes, is a safer synthetic form of a chemical compound originally found in French lilac (Galega officinalis). A significant number of modern day pharmaceutical preparations have their origins in chemicals extracted from plants and so it is not unreasonable for people to think that plant material may be helpful in treating diabetes and other conditions.

Herbal preparations are sometimes wrongly advertised as being safer alternatives to prescription medications because they contain only natural ingredients. However it is important to remember that 'natural' does not necessarily mean 'harmless', an example being the poison ricin which is extracted from the castor bean plant (Ricinus communis).

Claims are also often made for herbs and spices which are typically used at relatively low doses in flavouring foods. At higher doses these same herbs or spices may begin to have pharmacological effects on the body and it may not be safe to take them for a long time at such high doses. In addition to the active ingredient some plants contain other chemicals that can also be harmful at higher doses.

It is important to remember that herbal preparations, and other alternative treatments, can contain:

• an active ingredient which may be harmful
• an active ingredient which may not be harmful by itself but which may interact with other prescribed medication(s) which can cause that medicine to work differently and can also worsen the risk of a serious hypo (low blood glucose)
• adulterants – that is other chemicals added to the preparation, for example prescription-only medicines, medicines that have been withdrawn (Wood, 2004) or heavy metals sometimes found in Ayurvedic treatments
• ingredients which have no or insufficient effect on blood glucose control, or which contain no ingredients at all.

I’ve previously tried to find out how harm can be categorised as I’ve assumed someone must have arrived at this problem before me… any ideas?

I'm not aware of any good evidence recommending that any herbal preparation can be effectively or safely used to treat diabetes but of course this wouldn't prevent someone from trying a treatment if they wanted to. My advice, such as it is - I am not medically trained and there's the potential to do oneself quite a lot of harm with alternative treatments, is to take a pragmatic approach to herbal products.

I'd suggest that people with diabetes discuss them with their doctor or healthcare team, consult their pharmacist for advice about any known interactions and, if appropriate, monitor their blood glucose levels more closely to prevent hypos (low blood glucose levels) or to make sure that glucose levels do not rise. If someone with diabetes needs any changes to prescription medication, this should really only be done on the advice of a medically qualified doctor.

Avoid buying products from the internet – moneyback guarantees mean very little – and ignore hype, and patient testimonials (which are unlikely to be real).

References (see also in-text links)
Wood, DM, Athwal, S and Panahloo, A (2002) The advantages and disadvantages of a 'herbal' medicine in a patient
with diabetes mellitus: a case report. Diabetic Medicine, 21 (6): 625-627.
Abstract available from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15154951

A 48 year old man improved his diabetes management in the short term, and stopped taking other medication, after using herbal 'balls' purchased in India. It was subsequently discovered that the herbal preparations contained chlorpropamide, a prescription-only medicine that is no longer recommended in treating diabetes.

Recommended reading
Shane-McWhorter, L (2007) Complementary & alternative medicine (CAM) supplement use in people with diabetes: a clinician's guide. American Diabetes Association, Alexandria, Virginia.

See also
Campbell, AP (2010) Diabetes and dietary supplements Clinical Diabetes website.
Article available from http://clinical.diabetesjournals.org/content/28/1/35.full