Postcards from the Garden World Autumn 2020

Duck lunch

Here’s Annie Smithers in full flight telling us about the delicious duck confit that she cooked especially for our Inside Victoria tour group. We were so lucky to walk around Annie’s paddock-to-plate farm where she grows exceptional vegetables in rich volcanic soil at 750 metres above sea level. Then in to Trentham for lunch at Annie’s restaurant, du Fermier, and that duck, which was so special we all wanted to cook it for Christmas! Everyone bought Annie’s book to try to emulate it! Carolyn Dwyer

Seeing the heights

We climbed the giant Moon, Sun and Feather Serpent pyramids at Teotihuacan, an ancient site just north of Mexico City, which at its zenith was the largest city in pre-Columbian America, and home to 125,000 people. By the 7^th century it was gone. We are 2,400m above sea level here - higher than the peak of Mt Kosciuszko! Linda Ross

Cheers from Marlborough

At this point towards the end of our tour in New Zealand, all totally blown away by the gardens, and particularly the exquisitely realised French inspiration of Hortensia House in Marlborough (pictured), we were wondering how the gardens could get any better. Anticlimax seemed inevitable. But there were surprises still to come… Michael McCoy

New year in Tasmania

January is peak flowering in Tasmania and the floral exuberance of Old Wesleydale made our hearts sing. The garden is a sequence of exquisite ‘rooms’ that wrap around an old stone house with beautiful outbuildings. And Scott and Deb’s hospitality is just wonderful. Sandra Ross

Bloom!

On a glorious spring day we were in heaven, strolling amongst rows and rows of tulips at the peak of their bloom. If it weren’t for the lighthouse, Bass Strait, and the gum trees, we’d have thought we were in the tulip fields of the Netherlands. The Roberts-Thomson family grow tulips and other bulbs at Table Cape in northern Tasmania. We thought it couldn’t be better, until we spied a huge field of blue Dutch iris flowering in the distance under a stand of tall eucalypts! Libby Cameron