Stepping out of the arrivals hall at the international airport of Ho Chi Minh City, all your senses are assailed: it’s noisy, hot and frantic, but there’s one thing you notice – the smiles! I call Vietnam ‘The Land of Smiles’, because everywhere you go, everyone has a welcoming smile.

From a horticultural perspective, Vietnam has a lot to offer. The first taste of the tropics is at breakfast - dragon fruit, pomellos, lychees, rambutans, tiny sweet sugar bananas and delicious papaya. A trip to the Mekong Delta includes views of fruit plantations seen from small boats, the waterways often lined with coconut palms and trees dripping with longan fruit, as well as a trip to the floating markets at Cai Rang. Your small craft weaves its way through the hustle and bustle of the early morning market. Boats are laden to the gunwales with their particular fruit or vegetable for sale, advertised by tying a bunch of whatever on a tall pole above the boat!

Ho Chi Minh itself has many tree-lined boulevards and public garden spaces full of ixora, rhoeo, zinnias, portulaca and allamanda, all beautifully maintained. The Vietnamese have made an art form of sculpting ficus, which grows in huge shallow bowls in prominent public spaces.

Travelling north-east to the southern highlands en route to Da Lat, the scenery alters from lush tropical to a slightly more temperate climate. We pass through rubber tree and cashew nut plantations and then higher up through tea and coffee plantations. Da Lat used to be the cool climate resort for the French administration and has a very floral feel. Parks and gardens are full of azaleas and rhododendrons rubbing shoulders with cannas, bougainvilleas, cleome and delphiniums! The valleys around Da Lat are extremely fertile and we see market gardening on an impressive scale. The central city market is not to be missed, and apart from impressive fruit and vegetable displays, the cut flowers – particularly Dame Edna’s favourite, the gladioli, are eye-catching.

Descending from the highlands to the coast, the scenery alters to rice paddies once more. In 2007, Vietnam was the second largest exporter of rice in the world. The delta area in the south produces three crops a year, the central areas two and in the north usually just the one crop. Travelling north, in touch with the coast so much of the way, we see the true coconut palms lining the roadside and in amongst the paddy fields. Often we see rice harvesting and much of it is laid out on the roadside to dry on the tarmac!

Everyone falls in love with Hoi An– it’s small, quaint, has a great ambience and super cafes and restaurants . What we often see there are incredible adeniums, desert rose, ancient potted plants of them in full flower! One absolutely delightful interlude in Hoi An involves a bicycle ride out to a community market garden. We see traditional herbs and vegetables all being grown organically, take part in preparing and planting some veggies and then have a fun ‘hands-on’ cooking demonstration, culminating in a delicious lunch.

The scenery changes slowly as we travels further north to Hue, the ancient imperial capital. It’s here we see the largest and oldest frangipani trees surrounding many of the former Emperors’ burial tomb sites in the hills.

And lastly to Ha Noi. The parks around the central Hoan Kiem Lake are beautifully maintained. Willows weep towards the water and ‘flower’ beds are full of spathiphyllums and pothos, ‘devils ivy.’ Despite the frantic pace of the city, it has a wonderfully cosmopolitan feel and you can lose yourself for hours wandering in the narrow streets of the Old Quarter. No trip to Ha Noi is complete without at least one visit to KOTO restaurant. This was established by Australian Vietnamese Jimmy Pham as a way of giving street kids skills they could use in establishing a stable life. What started as a sandwich shop is now a 120-seat restaurant and internationally accredited hospitality program. The food is inspirational, as are the students manning this clever enterprise. And, as always in Vietnam, there are plenty of smiles.

Peter is once again leading our tour to Vietnam this year. We leave in March, and visit Ho Chi Minh city, Saigon, Da Lat, Hoi An and Ha Noi. If you are interested in joining him, call Ross Garden Tours on 1800 809 348 or visit www.rosstours.com