Plant envy: trillium

One of the great joys of garden travel is seeing plants grown to perfection that you know you can’t grow yourself. Okay, sometimes the joy is tempered with envy, but the sight of highly desired treasures that you have consigned…

Lilac in Vienna

  It’s a cliché of the garden world that when you visit a garden and marvel at its beauty, the gardener says ‘Oh yes, but it’s a pity you weren’t here last week, you just missed the xyz, which was…

China – The Wow Moments

Spring was breaking as Libby Cameron and her group of Ross travellers journeyed through China from Beijing to the Tang dynasty tombs and their terracotta figures in Xian, the peony festival in Luoyang, the beauty of Hangzhou and Suzhou and the…

Tulips from Amsterdam

Tulips are in florist shops all over town this week. But gardeners are only just beginning to think about where and when to plant the fat bulbs they have ordered. The flowers are months off.  So where are the tulips…

Bright: 6 Great Moments

The stems of the Himalayan cherry glow like a shiny copper pipe. Beautiful – and, according to Chinese legend, lucky . It must be true.  We rubbed those shiny stems in a garden in Bright and had a perfect weather,…

A taste of Orange

We need our own name for the act of going somewhere to be dazzled by glowing autumn leaves. In Japan it’s called momijikari, which roughly translates as ‘maple hunting’, and in the US it goes by the faintly fetishistic ‘leaf-peeping’. Whatever it’s…

Staying in the pink

No, it’s not your rose-tinted spectacles, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, old-style glamour girl of the Waikiki strip, really is a blushingly bright shade of pink.  The Royal Hawaiian is also one of Graham Ross’ favourite hotels and he made sure…