Botanicals
The World’s Most Beautiful Botanical Gardens (And Why April Needs Them).
April plays tricks on you. One day it feels like spring has finally arrived; the next, you’re back in your coat. I find myself scanning every yard and median strip for proof that something is coming, a crocus, a forsythia branch, anything. It’s that time of year when you need flowers and they haven’t quite shown up yet.
Botanical gardens have always been my answer to this. They exist all over the world, in forms you’d never expect, and they share one quality: they never make you wait. Here are four that have stayed with me.
Arctic Alpine Botanical Garden, Tromsø, Norway - The northernmost botanical garden on earth sits in a city where the sun disappears for months and temperatures fall well below minus ten. What grows here are survivors: 1,500 plant species that hug the ground, generate their own antifreeze, and trace their lineage back to the last Ice Age. When the snow finally clears in mid-May, continuous daylight triggers a growing season so short and so vivid it seems almost impossible. Plants that waited all winter in the dark, blooming in two months of midnight sun. There is a lesson in there somewhere.
Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne - Each winter, the Melbourne gardens transform after dark for Lightscape, an immersive installation where artists from around the world take over the grounds with large-scale light works. Trees, pathways, open lawns: all of it reimagined. It is the kind of experience that reminds you a garden is not just a collection of plants. It is a stage.
Toronto Music Garden - This one is close to home and worth a detour to the waterfront. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy designed the garden as a response to Bach’s First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello. Each movement of the suite becomes a section of the garden. The Prelude is a wave-like riverscape. The Allemande, a wandering forest grove. The Courante swirls through wildflowers. The Sarabande offers a stone stage for poets. You can walk through it knowing nothing about Bach and still feel the structure underfoot. That is good design.
Nezu Shrine's Azalea Garden, Tokyo, The shrine dates to 1705 and the azalea collection is older still, started by a feudal lord in the seventeenth century. Today it holds more than 3,000 plants across 100 species. In late April and early May, when everything peaks, the colour is genuinely staggering. One of those places you see in a photograph and think it can’t really look like that. It really looks like that.
For your reading list: Oliver Sacks, the great neurologist and writer, travelled to Oaxaca to study ferns and ended up writing one of his most joyful books: Oaxaca Journal, published in 2002. It is partly about botany, partly about what happens when a brilliant, restless mind gives itself permission to wander. His love of plants runs through almost everything he wrote, and this one is a pleasure from start to finish. If you want something closer to a field guide with a soul, try The Seasonal Gardner by Anna Pavord. She writes about plants the way a great travel writer writes about places: with curiosity, precision, and real affection.
We’ve just launched a Botanical pillow collection, and I am delighted with how it turned out. The colours hold, the blooms never fade, and the care instructions are blessedly simple. Have a look in Home Decor.
Hasta luego amigos,
Courage Drifter