There was a period in my life when I couldn’t go on a holiday without seeing a horticultural sight. It started, I think, about a decade ago – with the botanical gardens in Gothenburg, which are sprawling and understated and have an unexpected lake in the middle. Then it was the private cactus collection belonging to Clark Moorten in Palm Springs, and a solitary couple of weeks navigating my way around Japan through temple gardens as winter turned to spring through the changing colours of blossom: the searing coral of quince; the soft pink of cherry.
In time, I persuaded others to join in: it was on a first getaway with my now-husband that I first visited Hortus, Amsterdam’s 17th-century botanic garden. We stood in one of the low, steamy little glasshouses and watched moths take their first tentative flights from their chrysalises. From there, he – a man singularly disinterested in plants – has patiently accompanied me to flower markets at 3am in Hanoi and the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech at daybreak, so we could have it all to ourselves. We spent an afternoon tracing Piet Oudolf’s footsteps in Manhattan, and scaled hairpin turns in the Apuan Alps to spot things growing in the mountain air of Orto Botanico Pellegrini.
These were all good outings, but I realised along the way that they weren’t always necessary. Being a gardener is to look, deeply. To be a gardener abroad, then, is to look deeply at how things grow in a landscape that differs from the one you’re used to working in. We spent a couple of nights in an elegant 1930s hotel located in Terra Nostra Park on the Azores, which was fun, but I have stronger memories of the confounding botanic mishmash of those volcanic islands: blue-and-pink hydrangeas with flowers the size of your head rising from the mist; ferociously glowing nerines on every roadside verge; enormous ferns on one mountainside; scrub reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands on another. Strange things grow in old lava, it transpires.
To be a gardener abroad is to look deeply at how things grow in a landscape that differs from the one you’re used to working in
I’m writing this a few weeks after returning from a near-month spent travelling through Italy. Throwing caution to the wind with the baby’s nap schedule was one thing; having an itinerary that detailed anything beyond where we were spending the night was quite another. No gardens, no flower markets, no glasshouses, just an afternoon gelato habit and seeing what we stumbled upon. When I sent a gardener friend a photograph of the convoluted cave dwellings of Sassi di Matera, he replied not with wonder, but a nugget of perspective: ‘Needs a tree’.
Puglia did have trees, just not in that particular part. Huge, gnarled, ancient olives, the kind worthy of frescoes, lined up in groves that we drove through for days. I don’t think I’d ever imagined what an olive tree could be until I saw them – even the ones we walked through weeks later in northern Italy paled in comparison, let alone the skinny things we stick in pots. As we travelled out to the Adriatic coast and then into the Abruzzo mountains, I loved soaking up the changing greenery through the car window. I saw small forests growing above the perfect parabola of a motorway bridge and the salt flats of the Gargano Peninsula. We noticed the colour chart shift from shades of white to deeper Tuscan greens and those magnificent olive trees stretch out into vertiginous cipressini.
Among it all was one plant that I will remember above the others: a rosemary plant that defied belief. It covered a wall 30 feet tall and 15 wide – an enormous living habitat for moths, butterflies and other pollinators, bedecked in dewy cobwebs. Each morning I’d carry my son out to look at it, and we’d marvel as huge grasshoppers took flight before our eyes. Aside from half a litre of olive oil, we brought back nothing but memories. But I won’t be able to plant rosemary again without thinking of those Umbrian mornings.