Bushy Park (suburban London)

. . . as opposed to Bushy Park in Tasmania

Here are some touristy photos of Bushy Park (also spelled Bushey Park), next to Hampton Court.

Bushy Park extends over about 450 hectares; no doubt small by Texan standards but not at all bad for a suburb of a European capital. Its main feature (almost invisible here) is Chestnut Avenue, a grand avenue of horse-chestnut trees close to the road and lime trees further out. (This dates from the 1690s, and was part of Christopher Wren's plan for an aggrandizement of Hampton Court Palace.) The avenue is a well used component of the suburban road system, but somehow this doesn't spoil the park; indeed, it somehow adds to the general unlikeliness of the place when cars are creeping along, their drivers wary of both deer and radar.

Hard to imagine a half-century later, but SHAEF was based in Bushy Park from 1944, and Eisenhower planned Operation Overlord from here.

The pictures are pretty feeble. Blame me for unimaginativeness, poor composition, deviations from the level, etc. But the awful camera I used for the earlier photos gave me very little control over exposure and none over focus, and the one I used later (a Nikon Coolpix 900) insists on "autofocusing" -- a job that it can't do well.

Three quarters of the way along the avenue is a roundabout encircling a large pond, at the center of which is what's almost universally called the "Diana Fountain". Whether the eighteenth-century statue is really of Diana or Arethusa is a matter of rather academic dispute as it's too small to be seen without binoculars. It was brought here from Hampton Court in 1713.