Gardens & Wildflowers of Western Australia with Julie Kinney

Gardens & Wildflowers of Western Australia with Julie Kinney

Forests, flowers and private gardens of the South West

 

21–31 October 2020 (11 days)

 

HIGHLIGHTS…

Discover a region that is home to some of Western Australia’s finest private gardens, forests and magnificent displays of wildflowers in the company of long-time WA resident and gardener Julie Kinney.

Journey around the picturesque south-west corner of Australia and be immersed in a variety of breathtaking landscapes, from the splendour of Perth’s Botanic Gardens to the magnificent heights of the Valley of the Giants.

Meet the owners of gardens not normally open to the public and learn about Western Australia’s unique flora, Mediterranean climate and distinctive garden style. Uncover carefully cultured gardens bursting with springtime colour, including Margaret River’s Secret Garden, and explore the natural landscape on a guided wildflower walk of the wild Stirling Ranges.

Enjoy three nights in the captivating Margaret River region, sampling the region’s world-class wines, all against a backdrop of stunning landscapes and superb natural beauty.

 

AT A GLANCE:

• Visit a series of unique private gardens with an exclusive opportunity to meet their owners
• Travel through the spectacular Stirling Ranges, a plant and wildflower reserve of international significance
• Marvel at the grandeur of Western Australia’s tingle tree forest as you wander through the canopy at the Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk
• Spend three nights in the glorious Margaret River region, famous for its wineries, homesteads and gorgeous private gardens

 

ITINERARY

Wednesday 21 October 2020 / Arrive Perth

Arrive in Perth on suggested Qantas flights and make your way to the hotel. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements.
Tour arrangements commence at 18:00 with a welcome briefing by your tour leader, Julie Kinney, followed by dinner with Julie and fellow tour members. (D)

 

Thu 22 Oct / Perth

Begin today with a guided tour of Kings Park and Botanic Garden. Perched above the city on Mount Eliza, Kings Park boasts breathtaking views of Perth CBD and the Swan River and features over 3,000 species of the state’s unique flora. Visit a stylish Mediterranean private garden before transferring to the historic port of Fremantle for a casual lunch on the waterfront. Then, after a walking tour through the area’s vibrant laneways and old streets, board a scenic afternoon cruise on the picturesque Swan River back to Perth. (BL)

 

Fri 23 Oct / Perth – Albany

Depart Perth and travel south into the state’s Great Southern Wheatbelt. Visit Pine Avenue, a large hilltop garden with stunning vistas over the surrounding pastoral landscape where deciduous trees form a backdrop for old-fashioned roses. Continue south to the historic port city of Albany, arriving in the late afternoon.(BLD)

 

Sat 24 Oct / Albany

Begin the morning with a historical walking tour of Albany town and stroll down the first street ever built in Western Australia, past the colonial-style buildings which have now been transformed into charming museums and boutiques. Transfer to the National Anzac Centre to visit this award-winning memorial. This afternoon visit two large private gardens on the outskirts of Albany and enjoy afternoon tea in the picturesque grounds. (BD)

 

Sun 25 Oct / Albany

This morning visit a working farm at the foot of the Stirling Ranges on the edge of the Stirling Range National Park. An hour’s drive from Albany, the Stirling Ranges are a plant and wildflower reserve of international significance, with over 1,500 plant species, rare orchids, mountain bells and banksias. Enjoy a guided walk in the ranges, followed by a picnic lunch.
Return to Albany in the mid-afternoon and enjoy the remainder of afternoon and evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Mon 26 Oct / Albany – Manjimup

Depart Albany and transfer to the Tree Top Walk in the Valley of the Giants to enjoy wandering through the forest canopy of Western Australia’s magnificent tingle trees. Continue to Manjimup in the Southern Forests region, stopping en route in Pemberton for lunch and to visit an idyllic private garden. Arrive in Manjimup, the truffle centre of Western Australia, check in and enjoy dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. (BLD)

 

Tue 27 Oct / Manjimup – Margaret River

Today, enjoy a leisurely day’s drive to the Margaret River region. Begin with a guided visit to a nearby cutting-edge apple packing facility, one of only four in the country, followed by a visit to a large private garden for morning tea. Continue to Bridgetown for lunch and to visit a private garden in the picturesque Blackwood River Valley region. Arrive in Margaret River and check in to the hotel. (BL)

 

Wed 28 Oct / Margaret River

Begin the day with a morning at leisure to further explore the region at your own pace.
Then, visit the immaculate Fraser Gallop Estate garden with its superb lake vista and formal parterre garden, colourful circular rose garden and avenues of magnificent trees.
Later, visit Downsouth garden, voted the best large garden by Gardening Australia in 2016, a stylish, cutting-edge succulent garden located at Smiths Beach with stunning views over the Indian Ocean. Continue to Secret Garden, just in time to see the glorious spring-time bloom of roses, wisteria and irises. Tonight, enjoy dinner in local restaurant. (BD)

 

Thu 29 Oct / Margaret River

This morning transfer to Voyager Estate for a visit to the winery and gardens. Explore the estate’s expansive grounds, including its ‘werf’ garden – a South African Cape Dutch-styled walled garden named for the Afrikaans word for ‘yard’, which originally formed an integral part of working farmsteads. Continue to another exquisite private garden before enjoying a wildflower walk in the area. Then, explore another private garden in a bushland setting around a billabong. (BL)

 

Fri 30 Oct / Margaret River – Perth

Depart Margaret River and visit Busselton Jetty, the longest timber-piled jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. Embark on a leisurely drive north to Perth, and en route visit Orondo Farm and Gardens, a grand country garden framed by rugged bushland. Upon arrival in Perth in the late afternoon, join Julie and fellow tour members for a farewell dinner. (BLD)

 

Sat 31 Oct / Depart Perth

Tour arrangements conclude after breakfast.
Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements, including any additional nights’ accommodation, either before or after the tour.
(B)

Note: At time of publication (December 2019), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than two to three months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

Private Gardens of Victoria with Trisha Dixon

Private Gardens of Victoria with Trisha Dixon

Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula and Queenscliff

15–20 November 2020 (6 days)

 

HIGHLIGHTS…

Join writer and landscape photographer Trisha Dixon for an exploration of a selection of superb private, heritage and botanic gardens in Melbourne and the Mornington Peninsula.

Wander through the leafy suburb of Toorak and visit gardens belonging to prominent landscape designers. Then, enjoy the rare opportunity to visit Bickleigh Vale Village gardens in Mooroolbark, originally constructed by renowned landscape designer Edna Walling in the 1920s, before soaking up the tranquil atmosphere of Cruden Farm, the botanic legacy of the late Dame Elisabeth Murdoch.

Also visit meticulously manicured private gardens along the Mornington Peninsula’s ‘Millionaire’s Mile’ and take the ferry from Sorrento to Queenscliff to visit the Coriyule homestead, an award-winning heritage estate.

 

AT A GLANCE:

• Visit a series of superb private gardens in their peak springtime bloom
• Explore the stunning gardens created by renowned landscape designer Edna Walling
• Wander through Cruden Farm, once owned by the late Dame Elisabeth Murdoch
• Accompany contemporary landscape designer Fiona Brockhoff on a walking tour of gardens on the Mornington Peninsula’s ‘Millionaire’s Mile’
• Take advantage of this year’s Garden DesignFest (14-15 November) in Melbourne immediately before the tour begins

 

ITINERARY

Sunday 15 November 2020 / Arrive Melbourne
Arrive in Melbourne and make your own way to the hotel for check-in from 14:00. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements. At 18:00, join Trisha and fellow travellers for a welcome briefing before dinner in the inner-city suburb of Windsor.(D)

 

Mon 16 Nov / Melbourne

This morning transfer to Bickleigh Vale Village to visit a series of gardens originally created by renowned landscape designer Edna Walling in the 1920s. Enjoy access to private gardens not usually open to the public and appreciate the unique setting of the English-style country landscaping which has retained its original character. Enjoy lunch at one of the homes in Bickleigh Vale before continuing returning back to Melbourne to visit a special private garden.Return to the hotel and enjoy the evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Tue 17 Nov / Melbourne – Sorrento

Begin this morning with a tour of a private garden in the leafy inner-city suburb of Toorak, including the contemporary urban garden of landscape designer Fiona Brockhoff.
Continue to Cranbourne Botanic Gardens and wander through the Australian Garden, a space which has been carefully curated to reflect diverse landscapes and flora from across the continent. This afternoon visit Cruden Farm, the idyllic gardens of the late Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. Revel in the glorious colour of late spring blooms and explore the variety of styles and plantings scattered throughout. Transfer to Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula and check in to the hotel in time for dinner. (BD)

 

Wed 18 Nov / Sorrento

This morning join Fiona Brockhoff for a walking tour of ‘Millionaire’s Row’, on the headland of the Mornington Peninsula, and visit a meticulously manicured, private coastal garden along the way. Enjoy an exclusive visit to a private modern Australian garden, bursting with local indigenous plants that blur the boundaries between cultivation and wilderness.
Enjoy time at leisure for lunch and to explore the boutiques and cafés of idyllic Sorrento, before transferring to a private garden to enjoy wine and cheese in the tranquil grounds. Dinner this evening is at a restaurant in Sorrento. (BD)

 

Thu 19 Nov / Sorrento – Queenscliff

Begin the morning with a visit to a private garden in the lush Red Hill region, famous for its maritime climate and rich, deep red clay which gives the numerous local wineries a distinctive terroir. Enjoy lunch and a guided tour of the homely gardens of the Forge family at Merricks Estate before continuing to The Diggers Club at Dromana. Here, enjoy a guided visit to the gardens and nursery to learn about The Diggers Foundation’s work, which specialises in planting from heirloom seeds and practising traditional horticulture techniques. Then transfer to Sorrento Wharf for a ferry to Queenscliff. Check-in to the hotel in the late afternoon and enjoy the evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Fri 20 Nov / Depart Queenscliff

This morning, enjoy time at leisure to explore the historic town before visiting Coriyule homestead and garden in Curlewis, an award-winning, architecturally-designed heritage estate. Enjoy a guided visit to the house and grounds before a farewell lunch with Trisha and your fellow travellers. Return by coach to Melbourne in time for flights departing from 18:00. Tour arrangements conclude upon arrival at Melbourne Tullamarine Airport or Melbourne CBD (drop-off point to be advised). Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements, including any additional nights’ accommodation, either before or after the tour. (BL)

Note: At time of publication (January 2020), private owners of gardens had committed to opening their homes and gardens, however they prefer not to be named. While we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

Villas and Gardens of Central Italy

Villas and Gardens of Central Italy
From Vicenza to Frascati
with Julie Kinney

 

13 – 28 September 2020 (16 days)

 

HIGHLIGHTS …

 

Wander through the private grounds of majestic estates in Italy’s centre from Vicenza to Latina and unearth the rich history of some of Italy’s most romantic gardens.
Join gardening author Julie Kinney to travel along the spine of the Italian peninsula and visit gardens designed in the style of the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, intertwining elements of mythology, philosophy and theatre with outstanding flora and innovative landscape architecture.
Explore the verdant gardens of the Veneto with renowned Palladian-style villas in Vicenza and drive along the iconic Cypress-lined entrances to grand estates, including La Foce, in the hazy hills of Tuscany.
Last but not least, experience the best of Italy’s harvest season with an abundance of fresh local produce, notably olives and truffles.

Note: At time of publication (August 2019), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than two to three months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

 

AT A GLANCE:

 

• Visit the grand Renaissance estates of the Veneto, once the domain of counts and cardinals
• Uncover the fragile artistic sensibility of the Gardens of Ninfa in Latina, renowned as the most romantic garden in the world
• Wander through the glorious gardens at La Foce, an innovative 20th century reimagining of the iconic Italian Renaissance style
• Experience the richness of Italian cultural heritage in Florence’s superb museums
• Discover the outstanding results achieved when agriculture and horticulture converge, in the height of Italy’s harvest season

 

ITINERARY

 

Saturday 12 September 2020 / Depart Australia/New Zealand

Depart Australia or New Zealand in the evening on suggested Qatar Airways flights to Venice via Doha. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements.

 

Sun 13 Sep / Arrive in Venice – Vicenza

Arrive at Venice’s Marco Polo Airport in the afternoon on suggested flights in time for a group transfer departing the airport at 14:30, or at 15:00 from Mestre for Vicenza.
Check in to the Hotel Villa Michelangelo, a stunning, 18th century Palladian-style villa on the outskirts of Vicenza. In the evening, attend a welcome briefing and dinner with your tour leader Julie Kinney and fellow travellers. (D)

 

Mon 14 Sep / Vicenza (Verona)

This morning travel to Verona – the former Roman settlement where cobblestone streets are lined with medieval pink-hued marble buildings. Embark on a guided walking tour of the town and learn about the fierce history of the Verona Arena and the romantic tales for which the city is best known. Enjoy time at leisure for lunch before visiting Giardino Giusti, an exquisitely restored late-Renaissance garden, whose terraces reveal an extraordinary belvedere (beautiful view) of the surrounding city. Local folklore maintains that lovers who succeed in finding each other through the tight labyrinth of manicured hedges are destined for eternal love.
Return to Hotel Villa Michelangelo. Originally the country residence of the aristocratic Tomi family, the villa has since changed hands – however the forests of centenary trees and olive groves remain. The original walnut beams, Venetian terrazzo mosaic floors and antique furnishings preserve the period charm of this 18th century Palladian-style villa, while floor-to-ceiling windows provide panoramic views of the surrounding Berici Hills. (BD)

 

Tue 15 Sep / Vicenza

Begin the morning with a walking tour of Vicenza and witness a few of the elegant Renaissance buildings which earn the entire city a spot on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Founded in the 2nd century BCE, Vicenza rose to fame in the 16th century after renowned stone mason Andrea Palladio transformed the city’s architectural landscape and it became known as the ‘Pearl of the Renaissance’. Along the way, see the iconic Teatro Olimpico, where the oldest surviving stage set in the world is still used for modern productions, the Palladian Basilica, Palazzo Chiericati and the Corso Palladio, an entire street which seems frozen in time – a monument to Vicenza’s rich Renaissance history.
In the afternoon travel to the rolling hills surrounding the town centre where Palladio laid the groundwork for what would become the most influential architectural movement of the century. Explore the vast grounds of the Villa Rotonda and the Villa Valmarana, and see how Palladio innovatively applied classical Roman features to contemporary Italian villas. Tonight, enjoy dinner in the frescoed halls of a private villa. (BD)

 

Wed 16 Sep / Vicenza

Today visit Palladio’s Villa Barbaro. A monument to the Venetian bea vita (good life), the villa is now surrounded by a flourishing Prosecco estate where climbing roses, wisteria and bignonia adorn the entrance courtyard in the spring. Trompe l’oeil-style frescoes by Paolo Veronese cover the villa’s walls, while a Palladio-designed nymphaeum featuring a series of exquisitely carved figures frames a natural spring.
In the afternoon venture beyond the gates of the private Villa Tiepolo Passi for lunch and a guided tour through the estate’s expansive grounds, bordered by the Piovensan River. Built in the 17th century Venetian Baroque style, the grandiose villa looks out over a pristinely manicured Italian garden surrounded by a romantic English park. Return to the hotel in the late afternoon and enjoy the evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Thu 17 Sep / Vicenza – Fiesole

Check out of the hotel and depart Vicenza for the Monumental Baroque Gardens of Valsanzibio at Villa Barbarigo. Set against the lush Euganei Hills, Villa Barbarigo’s world-renowned gardens are designed as an allegorical journey representing the human quest for perfection. Built between 1665 and 1696, the garden’s heritage is evident not just in the beautiful Baroque statues which adorn the paths, but in the plants themselves – approximately 70% of the botanical specimens were planted in the 1660s, and some are even older.
Originally accessible by canal from Venice, the magnificent water-front gateway – known as Diana’s Pavilion – features a cast of Roman deities sculpted by the illustrious Henry Merengo. The garden also features the oldest (and tallest) Boxwood hedge labyrinth in existence, a sweeping staircase inscribed with philosophical sonnets, and an artificial island created specifically to house a rabbit warren. Enjoy private access to areas of the garden ordinarily closed to the public and a lunch of special local produce on the villa’s patio before continuing to Hotel Villa Fiesole, in the hills outside Florence. Check in to the hotel and enjoy the remainder of the evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Fri 18 Sep / Fiesole

This morning visit one of the oldest residences belonging to the Medici family in the Fiesole hills, a truly magnificent villa with terraced gardens overlooking Florence. Built by pioneering Renaissance architect Michelozzo in the mid-15th century, the villa is a spectacular example of classic palazzo-styling and remains one of the best-preserved Renaissance estates in Italy.
Enjoy lunch at leisure in Florence before visiting the Giardino Torrigiani. Since the 16th century, Giardino Torrigiani has been established as a premier botanical garden and is known for the biodiversity of its specimens from around the world, its greenhouses and the romantic winding paths that weave under through the shade of ancient cedars, oaks, cypress and magnolias.
Then, enjoy a guided tour of Villa Capponi, a 16th century villa and surrounding estate which has been extensively restored and converted into private luxury apartments, while still retaining its original aristocratic aesthetic. Enjoy time at leisure to explore central Florence before dinner in a local restaurant. (BD)

 

Sat 19 Sep / Fiesole

This morning visit a Saturday market and join the local Fiesolians in picking out the best produce available at the height of harvest season. Then visit Peyron Villa and Gardens, a relatively modern estate settled in the hazy hills of Tuscany, with sweeping views of Florence. The surrounding woods are rich with cedars, pine trees, poplars, oaks, elms and willow trees. Over twenty-nine fountains draw water from nearby the Mensola stream, which runs through the grounds and waters the orchards and gardens of camellias and azaleas.
For lunch today, ingredients from the morning market expedition will be used in a cooking demonstration of local cuisine. In the afternoon, enjoy a guided tour of Villa Gamberaia, a magnificent 17th century villa nestled in the hills of Settignano, with a panoramic vista overlooking the Arno Valley. The villa, built on the bones of what was originally a farm house, is set above gardens which feature a monumental fountain, manicured lawns and olive groves. (BL)

 

Sun 20 Sep / Fiesole

This morning, transfer to Florence for a guided tour of the Boboli Gardens, a sweeping pleasure garden located directly behind the Pitti Palace, home of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany. It was here that the now-familiar features of a uniquely Italian style of formal garden were developed during the 16th century, under the direction of Cosimo I. The vast green expanse is an outdoor museum replete with ancient and Renaissance statues, an ancient Egyptian obelisk and a Roman-style amphitheatre.
Later, approach Florence in the footsteps of Michelangelo and Donatello with a guided tour of the Bargello National Museum, the first Italian National Museum dedicated to the arts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Masterpieces by Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Verrocchio and Michelangelo adorn the halls of what was initially the headquarters of the Capitano del Popolo (Captain of the People) built in 1255. Enjoy the afternoon at leisure before dinner in Fiesole. (BD)

 

Mon 21 Sep / Fiesole – Siena

This morning travel from the surrounds of Florence to the hazy hills of southern Tuscany.
Stop first in the Etruscan settlement of San Gimignano and witness the city’s 14 original medieval towers which miraculously survived the urban renewal of the Florentine Renaissance and outlasted the ravages of the 20th century. Enjoy a guided walking tour of the ‘City of Beautiful Towers’ and spend some time at leisure for lunch in this living relic of a past age.
In the afternoon, continue to the Guicciardini Strozzi winery for a wine tasting. This family-owned estate is run by the descendants of two of Italy’s most powerful dynasties, who were joined by marriage in the 17th century. Wine production has occurred on this estate for over a thousand years and today specialises in the cultivation of Vernaccia di San Gimignano, a white grape native to Tuscany.
Continue to Siena and enjoy dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. (BD)

 

Tue 22 Sep / Siena

Begin the morning with a walking tour of Siena and experience a city which is caught in time. Generally regarded as the best-preserved medieval city in Italy, wander through this open-air museum of architecture and marvel at the multitude of ancient, Gothic and Baroque-style buildings. The Piazza del Campo in the heart of the city remains the theatre of the Palio horse races where the remaining contrades passionately compete in the historical pageant. Enjoy time at leisure for lunch and to explore the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Old Town.
This afternoon visit Villa Cetinale for a private guided tour of this 17th century Roman Baroque villa. Originally owned by Fabio Chigi, who became Pope Alexander VII in 1655, the current estate was largely remodeled by the Pope’s nephew, who transformed the house and gardens into a secluded oasis. Return to the hotel and enjoy the remainder of the afternoon at leisure, before dinner in a local restaurant. (BD)

 

Wed 23 Sep / Siena

Enjoy a morning at leisure to relax and soak up the tranquillity of the Hotel Borgo Scopeto Relais, with its panoramic views of Siena and the rolling hills of central Tuscany. Originally the home of the famous Sozzini dynasty of bankers, merchants and jurists in the 16th century, today the villa has been beautifully restored and retains all the elegance of a Renaissance residence with the added comfort of modern amenities.
Transfer from the hotel to a nearby Chianti winery for lunch and a wine tasting. In 1716, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III de’ Medici, issued the first legal document in the world to define a wine production area and in 1932 the Chianti region was awarded the prestigious DOCG status, which guarantees the outstanding quality and providence of the Chianti Classico wines produced in this area. Return to the hotel and enjoy the remainder of the afternoon and evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Thu 24 Sep / Siena – Frascati

Check out of the hotel and transfer to La Foce, the historic residence of the Origo family. Situated on the Via Francigena (the ancient pilgrim route running from France to Rome), the villa at La Foce was built as a hospice for pilgrims and merchants passing through in the 15th century. In the 1920s, the residence was adopted by Antonio Origo and his wife, Iris, the well-known English author. Under their direction the house was restored and the gardens re-worked by renowned English architect, Cecil Pinsent, who transformed the grounds into an innovative 20th century re-imagining of classic Italian landscape design. Sculpted box hedges create formal garden ‘rooms’, bordered by a glorious, wisteria-covered pergola, while the surrounding informal terraces are filled with cherry trees, cypresses and pines.
Enjoy a guided tour of the grounds, lunch at the estate’s restaurant and time to explore at your own pace before transferring to the town of Montepulciano. A medieval and Renaissance town perched high on a limestone ridge, Montepulciano is internationally renowned for its food and wine. Continue to Frascati and enjoy dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. (BLD)

 

Fri 25 Sep / Frascati

This morning, visit Giardini della Landriana, a landscape garden just a few kilometres from the Lazio coast. This modern estate features a series of ‘rooms’ spread over 10 hectares which each showcase a particular botanical feature – from ancient roses to groves of olive trees and more.
Return to the hotel and enjoy the afternoon at leisure to relax, or togo into town and explore the charming city of Frascati at your own pace. This evening dinner is at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

Sat 26 Sep / Frascati

Begin the morning with a visit to the Barberini Garden of the Pontifical Villa and stroll through the exquisitely manicured grounds of the Pope’s summer residence. This section of the estate was built into the ruins of Emperor Domitian’s country residence, and the ancient remains are beautifully integrated into the elegant landscape under the shade of mighty holm oaks.
Enjoy lunch at a nearby restaurant before touring the Gardens of Ninfa, a sprawling landscape garden built over and around the ruins of a medieval town. Bisected by the River Ninfa, the gardens are a lush oasis of biodiversity originally designed by Gelasio Caetani in the 1920s, which is known today as “the world’s most romantic garden”. Return to the hotel in the evening and enjoy the remainder of the evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Sun 27 Sep / Frascati

This morning visit Villa d’Este, a 16th century estate near Tivoli which is internationally renowned for its Italian Renaissance garden and famous for its profusion of fountains. The UNESCO World Heritage-listed site features 51 fountains and nymphaeums, all of which are fed by 875 metres of canal and which work entirely by gravity. Wander through this masterpiece of horticulture and hydraulic engineering before continuing to Hadrian’s Villa, the ruins of the enormous imperial palace built by one of Rome’s greatest emperors.
This afternoon, visit Palazzo Parisi, a 15th century estate in Oliveto which is the childhood home of internationally renowned garden-designer, Arabella Lennox-Boyd. Enjoy a lunch of home-made, locally-sourced, authentic Italian food before a guided tour of the gardens with the owner. Arrive at the hotel in the evening and enjoy the remainder of the evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Mon 28 Sep / Frascati – Rome

Check out of the hotel and transfer to the Minardi Frascati winery for a special farewell lunch with Julie and fellow tour members. For centuries the Minardi family have cultivated land in the Frascati DOCG area, specialising in white wines which pair beautifully with dessert, and the finest extra virgin olive oil.
If you are staying on in Italy after the tour, transfer to central Rome or if departing for home on suggested flights, continue to Rome International Airport, where tour arrangements conclude.
Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements, including any additional nights’ accommodation, either before or after the tour. (BL)

Gardens of the South Island

Gardens of the South Island
From Christchurch to Queenstown
with Elizabeth Swane

 

27 February – 09 March 2020 (12 days)

 

HIGHLIGHTS …

Join horticulturalist Elizabeth Swane for a tour of New Zealand’s South Island, from enchanting private gardens to the staggering grandeur of the natural landscape.
Wander through the meticulously manicured estates of Christchurch and marvel at the vibrant colours of Flaxmere Gardens as the glorious summer roses give way to brilliant autumnal hues. Uncover the dramatic ocean vistas and sublime ecology of Dunedin and the Otago Peninsula, before exploring the superb beauty of Queenstown’s natural landscapes, from the rugged Taieri Gorge to the alpine surroundings of Lake Wakatipu.
Revel in visits to some of the best private and botanical gardens of the South Island, and savour New Zealand’s most outstanding gourmet food and wines against a backdrop of beautiful landscapes.

Note: At time of publication (July 2019), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than two to three months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

 

AT A GLANCE:

• Visit a wonderful selection of private gardens, many of which have been labelled ‘Gardens of International or National Significance’
• Explore the parks and estates of Christchurch, including visits to the Botanical Gardens, Hagley Park, Frensham Gardens and Flaxmere Gardens
• Discover the coastal beauty of Dunedin; marvel at the world’s only mainland albatross colony and enjoy a special dinner in the main dining area of Larnach Castle
• Admire the diverse landscapes of Queenstown, from the untamed grandeur of the mountains surrounding the city to the carefully curated flora at Chantecler Garden
• Savour New Zealand’s finest gourmet food, premier wines and spirits

 

ITINERARY

Thursday 27 February 2020 / Depart Australia/New Zealand – Arrive Christchurch

Suggested afternoon arrival in Christchurch. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements.
This evening join Elizabeth and fellow travellers for a welcome briefing followed by dinner. (D)

 

Fri 28 Feb / Christchurch

This morning, enjoy a coach tour of Christchurch, stopping by some of its most iconic sites, including the Cardboard Cathedral, Christchurch Catholic Basilica, Margaret Mahy Playground and the Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial, and learn about the impact of the 2011 earthquakes on Christchurch’s architectural footprint. Finish the coach tour at the Botanic Gardens and pause to explore the verdant array of native and international flora.
After lunch, continue to Hagley Park and wander through the largest urban open space in Christchurch, characterised by its mature woodlands. Return to the hotel in the late afternoon before enjoying dinner at a nearby restaurant. (BD)

 

Sat 29 Feb / Christchurch

Begin the morning by transferring to Riccarton House, a grand Edwardian/Victorian homestead built in three stages between 1856 and 1900. Peruse the adjacent Farmers’ Market, widely acclaimed for the quality and diversity of its local produce, then take a guided tour of the main house and surrounding gardens.
In the early afternoon, visit Frensham Gardens, an English-style country garden which combines structured formal ‘rooms’ near the homestead with overflowing floral borders and an expansive woodland area. Return to the hotel and enjoy the remainder of the afternoon and evening at leisure. (B)

 

Sun 01 Mar / Christchurch

Start the day with a visit to Flaxmere Gardens, a NZ Garden of International Significance. Situated near the Southern Alps, this beautifully landscaped garden is framed by breathtaking mountain vistas, and heavily incorporates water features in the form of five terraced ponds.
After a light lunch, continue to Ohinetahi Gardens, another Garden of International Significance. Ohinetahi is also home to sculpture and woodland trails, and a 19th century homestead.  (BL)

 

Mon 02 Mar / Christchurch – Dunedin

Check out of the hotel and transfer to Trott’s Garden, a Garden of International Significance, which specialises in roses, dahlias and deep perennial borders. Continue to Timaru, a port city south of Christchurch, and enjoy lunch at leisure before visiting the Trevor Griffiths Rose Garden. This public garden, which features a range of heritage and modern blooms, was established to honour the collection of celebrated New Zealand rosarian, Trevor Griffiths.
From Timaru transfer by coach to Dunedin, the second largest city on the South Island, which is situated at the base of the Otago Peninsula and famous for its diverse ecology and deeply ingrained Scottish heritage. This evening enjoy dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. (BD)

 

Tue 03 Mar / Dunedin

This morning visit the Royal Albatross Centre at Taiar oa Head, home to the largest flying birds alive today, and the only mainland breeding colony of royal albatross in the world. Continue to Hereweka Garden, a stunning ecological sanctuary which features a rare remnant of the ancient Rimu trees that once completely forested the Otago Peninsula and a glorious collection of perennial blossoms.
Enjoy lunch at leisure in the picturesque village of Portobello, before visiting Glenfalloch Garden. Here, wander amongst a profusion of floral blooms and exotic imports interspersed between native ferns and indigenous New Zealand varieties. Then continue to Larnach Castle and Gardens for a private guided tour of the lovingly restored Gothic Revival mansion and the surrounding grounds, before enjoying dinner in the castle’s dining area. (BD)

 

Wed 04 Mar / Dunedin

Start the day with a visit to the Dunedin Botanic Gardens, which features a wide range of horticultural and botanical collections, including splashes of colourful florals and an extensive collection of indigenous species. A key aspect of the Dunedin Botanic Gardens collection is to cultivate and protect a wide variety of rare and endangered plant species from across New Zealand and around the world. Transfer to Olveston Historic Home and Garden for a guided tour of the authentically preserved historic house, extensive terraced gardens and magnificent conservatory. After lunch at a local restaurant, return to the hotel and enjoy the remainder of the afternoon at leisure. (BL)

 

Thu 05 Mar / Dunedin – Queenstown

This morning embark on a journey from Dunedin to Pukerangi via the Taieri Gorge Scenic Railway. Traverse this spectacular landscape and view scenery which is visible only by train, as well as learning about the construction of the railway by New Zealand’s early pioneers.
Arrive in Pukerangi and transfer to Wild Earth Winery for lunch and a wine tasting. This boutique, family-owned winery in Central Otago specialises in rich Pinot Noir and aromatic Pinot Gris, produced in the world’s southernmost wine-growing region. Continue to the hotel and check in, before enjoying the remainder of the evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Fri 06 Mar / Queenstown

This morning, visit the Queenstown Botanic Gardens. Wander amongst the pristine terraced gardens and admire the manicured lawns, wide variety of native and imported plants and elegant water feature, all surrounded by the shores of Lake Wakatipu. Continue to Chantecler Gardens and uncover the ecological diversity of this series of superbly landscaped spaces, including English, Formal, Tuscan, French, Oriental and Native gardens.
Enjoy an afternoon at leisure, before embarking on a gourmet dinner cruise on Lake Wakatipu. (BD)

 

Sat 07 Mar / Queenstown

Enjoy a morning at leisure before travelling north to central Otago to enjoy a tasting and lunch at Archangel Winery. The vineyard sits on two ancient glacial terraces in the Upper Clutha Valley, one of the southernmost wine-growing regions in the world.
After lunch visit a private garden in the Queenstown or Otago region. (Details to be confirmed in early 2020) Return to Queenstown to spend the evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Sun 08 Mar / Queenstown

This morning enjoy a walking tour of Arrowtown, a delightful Gold Rush village nestled beneath the peaks of the Southern Alps on the banks of the Arrow River. Wander through the historic buildings which preserve Arrowtown’s rich heritage, including miners’ cottages, old churches and the Chinese settlement which was established by immigrants during the Otago Gold Rush in the 1860s.
After a lunch at leisure transfer to Wild Dream Garden. Located on Lake Wakatipu, this rambling and rustic garden boasts water features, sculpture and 3,000 roses. Enjoy a tour of the house and garden before returning to Queenstown.
In the evening, join Elizabeth and fellow travellers for a special farewell dinner at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

Mon 09 Mar / Depart Queenstown

Tour arrangements conclude after breakfast.
Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements, including flights and any additional accommodation, either before or after the tour. (B)

Summer Garden Masterpieces of England and the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2020

 

Summer Garden Masterpieces of England and the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2020

 

Tour Highlights

• Discover exemplary gardens that showcase the modern romantics style of contemporary colour schemes and perennial herbaceous borders by some of the world’s greatest garden designers.
• Be treated to a selection of England’s finest contemporary private gardens designed by Tom Stuart-Smith including the gardens at Broughton Grange, Moor Hatches Garden, and his very own gardens at Serge Hill & The Barn.
• Learn how some of the most iconic English gardens continue to inspire modern designers when we visit Hidcote Manor, Kiftsgate, Great Dixter, Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst, & the Manor House Garden by Gertrude Jekyll.
• Compare naturalistic planting by Piet Oudolf and the minimalist design of Christopher Bradley-Hole in two unique gardens at Bury Court.
• Join Juliette Mead for a delightful home-cooked lunch at Moor Hatches, a Tom Stuart-Smith garden rarely opened to the public.
• Enjoy a special visit to Crockmore House Gardens and meet the owner, The Honourable Julia Kirkham, including a visit to Orchard Dean Nursery that supplied many of the plants.
• Visit Througham Court Garden, Dr Christine Facer’s ‘laboratory’ and enjoy a modern garden inspired by science.
• Take a tour and enjoy tea at HRH The Prince of Wales’ Highgrove House Gardens.*
• Be inspired by the exemplary plantings at Pettifers Garden, Bramdean House, the work of Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe at Shute House, & Marylyn Abbott’s West Green House & Gardens.
• Meet Mark Straver, owner of Hortus Loci nursery and learn about growing plants for some of the world’s greatest designers at RHS shows.
• Spend the morning with Andy Sturgeon, one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary garden designers and discover what inspires his incredible garden designs.
• Wander the swathes of herbaceous perennials as Sussex Prairie Garden, as well as Henrik Gerritsen’s Dutch influenced plantings at Waltham Place, that were sourced from Piet Oudolf’s own nursery in the Netherlands.
• Learn about the botanicals used in the process of distilling gin at the Bombay Sapphire Distillery, explore the eclectic shopping in laneways of Brighton and stroll the lovely historic streets of Bath.
* Note: we are unable to confirm a number of the private garden visits until March/April 2020.

 

15-day Garden Tour of England

Overnight Oxford (3 nights) • Bath (3 nights) • Winchester (3 nights) • Brighton (2 nights) • Windsor (3 nights)

 

Itinerary

Day 1: Thursday 25 June, London Heathrow Airport – Oxford
Arrive London Heathrow Airport and transfer to Oxford
• Welcome Meeting
Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight are scheduled to arrive into Heathrow Airport on 20 June. Upon arrival we transfer by private coach to Oxford, where we spend the next three nights. Those taking alternative flights should meet the group at the hotel in Oxford, or alternatively at the Heathrow Airport Arrivals Hall to join the coach transfer– please contact ASA to arrange a suitable meeting time. In the evening there will be a short Welcome Meeting at the hotel. (Overnight Oxford)

 

Day 2: Friday 26 June, Oxford – Banbury – Lower Wardington – Oxford
• Broughton Grange, Banbury
• Pettifers Garden, Lower Wardington
• Welcome Dinner at The Quod, Oxford
We begin our tour of contemporary gardens with a visit to Broughton Grange, which has received much attention since opening under the National Garden Scheme (NGS) in 2004. The gardens are set in 350 acres of parkland, farmland, and open meadow, with a style of planting that owes its origins to the Victorian era. The gardens’ development accelerated in 2001, when acclaimed landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith, who has been awarded eight RHS Chelsea Flower Show gold medals including three Best in Show awards, was commissioned to transform a 6-acre field into a walled garden. This impressive new garden features three individually themed terraces and has been designed with consideration to the surrounding rural landscape. Broughton Grange now represents one of the most significant private contemporary gardens in Britain. Broughton Grange is the first of a selection of Tom Stuart-Smith gardens included in the tour. A ploughman’s lunch will be provided after our guided tour of the gardens.

After lunch, we explore the innovative Pettifers Gardens, where head gardener Polly Stevens will provide us with a guided tour. The tour will describe not only the interesting and surprising plant combinations, but also how this garden has undergone changes made by the owner and designer, the Honourable Mrs. Gina Price, since the early 1990s, when she began to design the garden. Combined with friendship and advice from Diany Binney at Kiftsgate Court Gardens, Pettifers has today developed a reputation as one of the must-see English country gardens. Adorned with herbaceous perennials, this garden is guaranteed to please in the peak of English summer. RHS judge and media personality James Alexander-Sinclair described the garden in Gardens Illustrated magazine as “undoubtedly one of the most exciting and delightful gardens in the country.”

Our dinner destination is the Quod Restaurant and Bar in Oxford. An ASA favourite, the Quod will be the perfect location for the group to formally sit down together for a welcome meal and compare notes from the day with tour leader and leading garden designer Jim Fogarty. (Overnight Oxford) BLD

 

Day 3: Saturday 27 June, Oxford – Bibury – Chipping Campden – Oxford
• Village of Bibury, the Cotswolds
• Hidcote Manor, Chipping Campden
• Kiftsgate Court Gardens, Chipping Campden
Our day commences with a drive through the Cotswolds visiting the village of Bibury, described by William Morris as “the most beautiful village in the Cotswolds.”

Later in the morning, we undertake a self-guided tour of the delightful National Trust property, Hidcote Manor. Hidcote is a significant garden, and one of England’s most influential gardens of the 20th century. It was designed in the English Arts and Craft style by Major Laurence Johnston as a series of garden rooms each with a different character and theme and each separated from each other by walls and hedges. We will explore how and why Hidcote remains as one of the world’s most influential gardens.

Located less than a kilometre away, we take a short walk to Kiftsgate Court Gardens, sometimes referred to as the ‘twin’ of Hidcote. After sitting down to lunch in the tearooms, we will hear the story of Kiftsgate’s three generations of women gardeners: Heather Muir, Diany Binny and Anne Chambers. Heather Muir created the gardens in the 1920’s. From the mid-50’s, Diany Binny continued to add to the garden by creating the semi-circular pool in the lower garden and redesigning the ‘white sunk garden.’ One of the finest accomplishments of its current owner, Anne Chambers, is the new ‘abstract modern’ water garden. (Overnight Oxford) BL

 

Bath – 3 nights

Day 4: Sunday 28 June, Oxford – Bruton – Bath
• Piet Oudolf designed garden and the ‘New Perennial Movement’
• Afternoon at leisure in Bath
Piet Oudolf is a Dutch garden designer who has been credited with leading the global wave of the ‘New Perennial Movement,’ a naturalistic artist-driven planting style that relies on swathes of perennial plants and ornamental grasses providing an ever-changing landscape through the seasons. One of his famous gardens includes ‘Oudolf Field’ – a large perennial meadow to the north of the farmyard and new gallery buildings. The garden bears some resemblance to a traditional English classic garden, but is softened by use of modern herbaceous borders, and swathes of perennials, which loosens the overall effect. There is also a mix of old and new architectural styles, with the site’s original buildings and the new gallery.

After lunch we drive to Bath. After checking to our hotel the afternoon will be at leisure. (Overnight Bath) BL

 

Day 5: Monday 29 June, Oxford – Througham – Highgrove – Bath
• Througham Court: private tour with Dr Christine Facer Hoffman (exclusive private visit)
• Highgrove House: Lunch & Guided tour of Gardens (subject to confirmation in 2020)
We depart Oxford early this morning and travel 77kms south to the county of Gloucestershire. Here, we visit Througham Court, a 17th-century Jacobean house with 6 acres of formal and informal gardens, and receive a private tour by the garden’s owner and designer, Dr Christine Facer Hoffman. Hoffman, scientist and landscape architect, describes her private garden as “a personal laboratory to experiment with new ideas, materials and planting combinations.” Developed since 2000, contemporary areas have been artfully embedded in the Cotswold architect Norman Jewson’s 1930’s Arts and Crafts masterpiece. Hoffman has stated that her contemporary ‘fragments’ are inspired by scientific discoveries and theories. She uses mathematical number sequences found in nature to create a symbolic and metaphorical narrative so that the gardens may be ‘read’ by the visitor. Througham Court has been described by The Sunday Times as “one of England’s most remarkable gardens” and has featured on Alan Titchmarsh’s Garden Secrets on BBC 2.

Mid-morning we make the short drive to Doughton village, where Highgrove House, the country home of Their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, is located. The Prince purchased Highgrove in 1980, and has spent 30 years transforming its grounds into what have been acknowledged as some of the most brilliant and inventive gardens in the United Kingdom. “A series of interlinked areas, each with their own character and purpose, weave magically around the garden, with the house always visible in the distance. For the last 25 years the gardens and surrounding land have been managed to the organic and sustainable principles that His Royal Highness has for so long championed.” After lunch and our 2-hour guided tour of the gardens, we return to Oxford, where the evening is at leisure. (Overnight Bath) BL

 

Day 6: Tuesday 30 June, Bath – Brockhampton – Upton Bishop – Bath
• Brockhampton Cottage: the Private Garden of Peter & Ravida Clay (exclusive private visit)
• Grendon Court, Upton Bishop: the Private Garden of Mark & Kate Edwards (exclusive private visit)
Brockhampton Cottage, Designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, is located in Herefordshire atop a hill with a view to the south and west of unspoiled countryside. Owned by the visionary Peter Clay, who as a co-owner of the biggest gardening website in the UK (Crocus.co.uk) comes with pedigree in the British horticultural industry, the garden has been created in the modern romantic style with herbaceous borders set over a series of terraced spaces with wild flower meadows beyond. This beautifully designed & constructed garden blends into the distant views over the Herefordshire valleys and will not disappoint.

Just across the road is Grendon Court, a garden also designed by Tom Stuart-Smith. Created over two levels this garden comprises a mix of mass planted perennials combined with ornamental flowering grasses, providing a variety of texture and colour and year-round interest. Owner of Grendon Court, Kate Edwards, will put on a two-course lunch for us at her garden, and together with Peter Clay from Brockhampton Cottage, will explain to the group the fascinating story of how both gardens were created. (Overnight Bath) BL

 

Winchester – 3 nights

Day 7: Wednesday 1 July, Bath – Shaftesbury – West Amesbury – Winchester
• Shute House, Shaftesbury
• Moor Hatches, West Amesbury: home-made lunch at the Private Garden of Juliette Mead & Guy Leech (exclusive private visit)
This morning we tour south from Bath to visit the gardens of Shute House, originally designed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe in the late 1960s. Thirty years later, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe was tempted out of retirement to revitalise the gardens for its new owners, in what would become his final project. The gardens include waterfalls, canals and rills that run through a series of atmospheric ‘rooms.’ Current owners John and Suzy Lewis continue to maintain the gardens. There is certainly a formal feel to Shute House gardens, but the inclusion of contemporary sculptures mixes an element of playfulness to the formality.

After a light lunch, we pay a visit to another of Tom Stuart-Smith’s creations, Moor Hatches. This is a contemporary family garden with a swimming pool that has been widely photographed and published. Access to Moor Hatches is provided by application only and it is a rare privilege to be welcomed into this garden. (Overnight Winchester) BL

 

Day 8: Thursday 2 July, Winchester – Upton Grey – Hook – Whitchurch – Winchester
• The Manor House Garden, Upton Grey
• Hortus Loci Nursery, Hook: private tour with Mark Straver
• West Green House Gardens, Hook: private tour with owner and designer Marylyn Abbott
• Bombay Distillery, Whitchurch
The Manor House garden was designed and planted in 1908 and 1909 by Gertrude Jekyll and is said to be the most accurately and fully restored of her gardens. Jeckyll (1843-1932) was an influential British garden designer often described as a premier influence in the world of garden design. Thanks to her association with the English architect, Edwin Lutyens, Jekyll was half of one of the most influential and historical partnerships of the Arts and Crafts movement. Jeckyll was one of the first to explore the use of colour and texture in planting designs that remains relevant today.

The garden at the Manor House consists of a formal garden with herbaceous borders in colours running from cool colours at either end to bright hot colours in the centre, a wild garden, a rose lawn, planted drystone walls, as well as bowling and tennis lawns. The house gardens are surrounded by a nuttery, kitchen garden, and orchard. The 15th century Manor House was altered by Ernest Newton in 1903-1905 for Charles Holme, founder of the leading Arts and Crafts magazine The Studio.

Later in the morning, we will visit Hortus Loci, a wholesale plant nursery that sources plants for high-profile landscape designers. Since starting in 2011, Hortus Loci have supplied plants to many gold medal gardens at RHS Chelsea Flower Show & RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. The owner & director, Mark Straver will provide us with a personal tour and give some background to some of the challenges with supplying plants for RHS shows. Previously, as head buyer for Crocus, Mark was integral in sourcing the plants for the gold medal winning Australian Garden presented by Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2011, designed by Jim Fogarty. With Hortus Loci, Mark sourced and supplied the plants for ‘Essence of Australia’ presented by Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria at RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2014, designed by Jim Fogarty, that was awarded a gold medal and the Tudor Rose Award for Best in Show. The tour will be followed by a light lunch on site at the Hobo.co garden café.

West Green House Gardens, created by acclaimed garden designer and writer, Marylyn Abbott, is one of England’s finest manor house gardens, marrying neo-classical style with contemporary design. These are the creation of an Australian, Marylyn Abbott. The gardens are a personal creation based upon Marylyn’s early love of gardens, inculcated by her mother and grandmother when she was growing up in Australia (Marylyn masterminded the famous Australian garden, ‘Kennerton Green’). At West Green House she has reconciled her Australian gardening heritage, dominated by brilliant light, with England’s softer, more muted atmosphere. Marylyn is a prolific writer; her latest book The Resilient Garden, in keeping with her experience reconciling very different gardening environments, discusses a collection of plants that will acclimatise to both Mediterranean and cool temperate gardens. The garden includes a walled garden, a potager garden, perennial borders, the ‘Paradise Water Garden’ and the contemporary ‘Garden of the Five Bridges.’ With unfolding garden rooms opening up to more informal garden areas, the garden includes follies and touches of humour.

Our day will finish with a visit and tour of the Bombay Sapphire Distillery, where we will learn about the role that botanicals play in the process of making gin. In recent years, gin has undergone a revival of interest with a new generation keen to learn about the variety of herbs, spices and fruits used to make versions of this traditional drink. The award-winning sustainability measures in design and construction are at the heart of this state-of-the art distillery. (Overnight Winchester) BL

 

Day 9: Friday 3 July, Winchester – Bramdean – Farnham – Winchester
• Bramdean: Private Garden of Victoria Wakefield (exclusive private visit)
• Bury Court, Farnham: designed by Piet Oudolf & Christopher Bradley-Hole (subject to confirmation in 2020)
Bramdean House is a 5-acre plantsman’s garden famous for its herbaceous perennial borders. The formal gardens comprise a progression of three compartments laid out on rising ground and aligned on the north front of the house. A central doorway opens from the house with an axial grassed path that is flanked by the widely photographed deep herbaceous borders, planted in mirror image on either side of the path. Although traditional in style, we will explore the connection between traditional herbaceous English borders and the style of planting used in the natural style plantings of today’s more contemporary English gardens.

After morning tea at Bramdean, and a short drive north with South Downs National Park on our right, we arrive at The Barn at Bury Court for a guided tour. The gardens at Bury Court are contemporary in style and include gardens designed by Piet Oudolf & Christopher Bradley-Hole. The courtyard garden was created by owner John Coke in collaboration with Piet Oudolf and reflect Oudolf’s passion for the naturalistic style and feature ornamental grasses and hardy perennials.

The front garden at Bury Court was added later, and was designed by leading landscape minimalist Christopher Bradley-Hole. Bradley-Hole has won multiple gold medals at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, including Best in Show, and his designs work on mathematically harmonious proportions that often form the backbone to his gardens. Providing a contrast to the courtyard garden, this garden is designed around a formal grid pattern of rusted steel-edged beds and gravel paths. The garden is planted with swathes of tall grasses mixed with carefully selected flowering perennials to create a dream-like meadow feel. At its tranquil heart is a reflective pool and simple but innovative seating area. (Overnight Winchester) BL

 

Brighton – 2 nights

Day 10: Saturday 4 July, Winchester – Brighton and surrounds – Brighton
• Spend the morning with Andy Sturgeon, one of UK’s leading garden designers
• Explore Brighton including the famous Brighton ‘Lanes’
Today we will spend the morning with Andy Sturgeon who is one of the UK’s leading garden designers. He is a published author, journalist and broadcaster, and an active commentator in the international garden design sector. His modern designs are a fusion of traditional materials and contemporary styling which have become known for their timeless architectural qualities, innovative planting and sculptural characteristics. Andy has exhibited several times at RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show and has won seven gold medals at RHS Chelsea Flower Show as well as twice being awarded the coveted ‘Best in Show’ award. The Sunday Times and House and Garden Magazine place Andy in the Top Ten list of landscape designers in Britain. Andy Sturgeon & Jim Fogarty are both design directors of Garden Design Asia and have travelled together and exhibited extensively at international garden shows in Japan, Korea, Malaysia & Singapore.

In the afternoon we will have free time to explore the sites of Brighton. ‘The Lanes’ are a collection of narrow alleyways in in the city of Brighton famous for their many small shops that include antique & jewelry shops as well as cafes, restaurants and bars. (Overnight Brighton) B

 

Day 11: Sunday 5 July, Brighton – Northiam – Cranbrook– Brighton
• Great Dixter House and Gardens, Northiam
• Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Cranbrook
Today is a day of iconic English gardens. The Lloyd family developed Great Dixter early in the 20th century from an original design by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Today it is more famous for the plantings established by Christopher Lloyd documented in his many classic gardening books. The residence comprises a mid 15th-century hall house, typical of the Weald of Kent, to the south side of which a second, early 16th-century yeoman’s house was grafted. Lutyens enjoyed using local materials and retained farm buildings like oast houses, cowsheds, barns and outbuildings. Around these he designed his garden, featuring a sunken garden, topiary and yew hedges. Christopher Lloyd managed Great Dixter from the 1950s and was noted for his innovative approach and introduction of concepts like the mixed border and meadow garden, and his replacement of the rose garden with schemes using less fashionable plants like cannas and dahlias. We will investigate his full range of planting schemes. Although Lloyd is no longer present in the garden his gardener Fergus Garrett has achieved what some consider even better results in recent years. Great Dixter was chosen by Alan Titchmarsh as one of his 10 Best British Gardens and is widely acclaimed by plantsmen and women worldwide.

We next drive to Sissinghurst Castle Garden, one of England’s greatest garden delights. Sissinghurst was the garden of poet and writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, journalist, MP and diplomat, and is possibly the most influential of all 20th-century gardens. Built around the remnants of an Elizabethan castle, of which the tower remains a central garden feature, the garden is divided into distinct spaces where a formality established by Nicolson is clothed by a romantic planting style pursued by Sackville-West. The garden retains its original charm and romance with such delights as its parterre, white garden, cottage garden, nut walk and orchard. We shall explore Sissinghurst’s many hidden corners, sumptuous planting combinations and the view from the top of the tower, always a good starting point for those who wish to understand the garden’s layout. In the late afternoon, we travel to Brighton. (Overnight Brighton) BL

 

Windsor – 3 nights

Day 12: Monday 6 July, Brighton – Henfield – Molesey – Windsor
• Sussex Prairie Garden, Henfield
• RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, Molesey

 

Day 13: Tuesday 7 July, Windsor – Henley-on-Thames – White Waltham – Windsor
• Crockmore House Gardens, Henley-on-Thames: designed by Christopher Bradley-Hole (exclusive private visit)
• Waltham Place: designed by Henk Gerritsen

 

Day 14: Wednesday 8 July, Windsor – Bedmond – Windsor
• Serge Hill, Bedmond: Private Garden of Tom Stuart-Smith (exclusive private visit)
• The Barn, Bedmond: Private Garden of Tom Stuart-Smith (exclusive private visit)
• Farewell meal at local restaurant

Spring Garden Masterpieces of England and the RHS Chelsea Flower Show

Spring Garden Masterpieces of England and the RHS Chelsea Flower Show

 

Tour Highlights

 

•Immerse yourself in the lovely medieval city of Oxford and visit Magdalen College gardens.
•Study the development of the English country house from 17th-century Rousham House to 20th-century Great Dixter.
•Be treated to the contemporary gardens of Pettifers and Tom Stuart-Smith’s Broughton Grange, partly influenced by the Dutch Wave movement.
•Visit private gardens such as Througham Court Gardens and HRH The Prince of Wales’ Highgrove House Gardens.*
•Make a special visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with Richard Barley, Director of Horticulture.
•Explore Australian Marylyn Abbott’s award-winning West Green House Gardens; and visit Ightham Mote, a wonderful example of a small medieval moated manor house, perfectly located within a peaceful garden surrounded by woodland.
•Wander through picturesque Cotswold villages including Stow-on-the-Wold.
•Enjoy a farewell meal at the Kew Gardens Botanical Restaurant.

* Note: we are unable to confirm a number of the private garden visits until February 2020.

 

11-day Garden Tour of England

 

Overnight Oxford (6 nights) • Royal Tunbridge Wells (1 night) • London (3 nights)

 

Overview

 

This exciting program combines a day at the renowned Chelsea Flower Show and the Garden Museum with a tour to some of England’s finest country houses and gardens. Restored Bourton House won the prestigious HHA/Christie’s ‘Garden of the Year Award’ in 2006. Sezincote’s oriental gardens complement S.P. Cockerell’s fascinating ‘Indian’ house. Designed by Chelsea Gold Medal winner Tom Stuart-Smith, Broughton Grange represents one of the most significant private contemporary gardens in Britain. Pettifers Garden stylishly combines the Dutch Wave movement with ‘English prettiness’ in a townhouse garden by owner Gina Price. Scientist and architect Christine Facer Hoffman has appended to her 17th-century house her own experimental garden that creates spatial narratives based upon number sequences found in nature. Rousham’s interiors are extraordinarily well preserved; it’s been owned by the Dormer family since 1635 and has fine landscaped gardens laid out by William Kent. Great Dixter is famous for its plantings established by Christopher Lloyd and Sissinghurst is the beloved masterpiece of Vita Sackville West. At West Green House Gardens Marylyn Abbott has reconciled her Australian gardening heritage, dominated by brilliant light, with England’s softer, more muted atmosphere. Ightham Mote, meanwhile, is a wonderful example of a small medieval moated manor house, located within a peaceful garden surrounded by woodland. In these and other fine gardens we explore the initial influence of Italian formalism, 18th-century reactions against formal Italian and French modes by English landscape gardeners, the reversion to more formal styles in the second half of the 19th century, and the personal influences of that century’s famous garden designers. Special highlights include a planned visit to Highgrove, where HRH The Prince of Wales has created some of the most inspired and innovative gardens in the United Kingdom and a tour of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew with Richard Barley, Director of Horticulture. In Oxford we visit the Oxford Botanic Garden, the oldest botanic garden in Britain (founded in 1621), featuring inspiring herbaceous borders and glasshouses, and the award-winning gardens of 550-year-old Magdalen College. We also enjoy lovely Cotswold villages such as Stow-on-the-Wold, stately Tunbridge Wells, and learn about the development of the English country house.

 

Oxford – 6 nights

Day 1: Tuesday 12 May, London Heathrow – Oxford
•Arrive London Heathrow and transfer to Oxford
•Introduction & Welcome Dinner

On arrival at London Heathrow airport, those taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer by private coach to Oxford, home to the oldest university in the English-speaking world. If you are travelling independently, you should meet the group at the MacDonald Randolph Hotel. This evening there will be a short introductory meeting before dining at a local restaurant. (Overnight Oxford) D

 

Day 2: Wednesday 13 May, The Cotswolds
•Private visit of Sezincote House and Gardens
•Market town of Moreton-in-Marsh
•Guided tour of Bourton House Gardens with the Head Gardener, Jacky Rae
•Stow-on-the-Wold

Today we drive into the Cotswolds to visit two magnificent gardens located near the village of Moreton-in-Marsh. Our first visit is to Sezincote Manor, where an exotic oriental garden was created to complement the architect S.P. Cockerell’s fascinating 19th-century Regency house, which he designed in an Indian, Moghul style; Sezincote served as the inspiration for George IV’s Brighton Pavilion. Sezincote’s extraordinary eccentricities include a temple, not to any Grecian deity, but to the Hindu goddess Souriya; garden sculptures include a bronze serpent and Brahmin bulls, whilst minarets top the conservatory.

Midday we travel to the northern Cotswolds town of Moreton-in-Marsh, where there will be time at leisure for lunch and to explore the high street, which has many elegant 18th-century inns and houses, including the Redesdale Market Hall.

In the afternoon we continue to the nearby award-winning three-acre gardens of Bourton House. The gardens had become overgrown and neglected when Richard and Monique Paice acquired them in 1983. Over the past 25 years, the ornamental garden with its 18th-century raised walk overlooking the rolling Cotswold Hills, the original kitchen garden, and Bourton’s orchard, have been transformed. The Paices’ achievement was recognised when Bourton House Garden was honoured with the prestigious HHA/Christie’s ‘Garden of the Year’ award in 2006.

Our day concludes with a drive through the picturesque Cotswolds, including a short stop at the village of Stow-on-the-Wold. Stow-on-the-Wold was an important medieval market town and is now a centre for English antiques. As well as the large market square, the town has some very early coaching inns, including the Royalist Hotel that has timbers that have been carbon-dated to 987; it is believed to be the oldest inn in England. (Overnight Oxford) B

 

Day 3: Thursday 14 May, Oxford – Banbury – Lower Wardington – Oxford
•Broughton Grange, Banbury
•Pettifers Garden, Lower Wardington

We begin today with a visit to Broughton Grange, which has received much attention since opening under the National Garden Scheme (NGS) in 2004. The gardens are set in 350 acres of parkland, farmland, and open meadow, with a style of planting that owes its origins to the Victorian era. The gardens’ development accelerated in 2001, when acclaimed landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith, who has been awarded eight RHS Chelsea Flower Show gold medals including three Best in Show awards, was commissioned to transform a 6-acre field into a walled garden. This impressive new garden features three individually themed terraces and has been designed with consideration to the surrounding rural landscape. Broughton Grange now represents one of the most significant private contemporary gardens in Britain. A ploughman’s lunch will be provided after our guided tour of the gardens.

After lunch, we explore the innovative Pettifers Gardens, where head gardener Polly Stevens will provide us with a guided tour. The tour will describe not only the interesting and surprising plant combinations, but also how this garden has undergone changes made by the owner and designer, the Honourable Mrs. Gina Price, since the early 1990s, when she began to design the garden. Combined with friendship and advice from Diany Binney at Kiftsgate Court Gardens, Pettifers has today developed a reputation as one of the must-see English country gardens. RHS judge and media personality James Alexander-Sinclair described the garden in Gardens Illustrated magazine as “undoubtedly one of the most exciting and delightful gardens in the country.”(Overnight Oxford) BL

 

Day 4: Friday 15 May, Oxford – Througham Court – Highgrove – Oxford
•Private Guided tour of Througham Court Gardens with Dr Christine Facer Hoffman
•Highgrove House: Lunch & Guided tour of Gardens (subject to confirmation in 2020)

We depart Oxford early this morning and travel 77 kilometres south to the county of Gloucestershire, where Througham Court, a 17th-century Jacobean house with 6 acres of formal/informal landscape overlooks a peaceful Cotswold valley. Christine Facer Hoffman, scientist and landscape architect, describes her private garden as “a personal ‘laboratory’ to experiment with new ideas, materials and planting combinations.” Developed since 2000, contemporary areas have been artfully embedded in the Cotswold architect Norman Jewson’s 1930s Arts and Crafts masterpiece, which features magnificent yew topiary and dry stone wall terracing. Hoffman has stated that her contemporary ‘fragments’ are inspired by scientific discoveries and theories. She uses mathematical number sequences found in nature to create a symbolic and metaphorical narrative so that the gardens may be ‘read’ by the visitor. They recently featured in the RHS publication The Garden magazine and in Alan Titchmarsh’s Garden Secrets on BBC 2.

Mid-morning we make the short drive to Doughton village, where Highgrove House, the country home of Their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, is located. The Prince purchased Highgrove in 1980, and has spent 30 years transforming its grounds into what have been acknowledged as some of the most brilliant and inventive gardens in the United Kingdom. “A series of interlinked areas, each with their own character and purpose, weave magically around the garden, with the house always visible in the distance. For the last 25 years the gardens and surrounding land have been managed to the organic and sustainable principles that His Royal Highness has for so long championed.” After lunch and our 2-hour guided tour of the gardens, we return to Oxford, where the evening is at leisure. (Overnight Oxford) BL

 

Day 5: Saturday 16 May, The Cotswolds
•Hidcote Manor
•Kiftsgate Court Gardens
•Village of Bibury

Today we travel first to Chipping Campden and the delightful National Trust property, Hidcote Manor. Hidcote is significant for its influential garden, designed in the English Arts and Craft style by Major Laurence Johnston as a series of rooms of different character and theme, separated from each other by walls and hedges.

At midday we continue to Kiftsgate Court Gardens, which tell the story of three generations of women gardeners: Heather Muir, Diany Binny and Anne Chambers. Heather Muir created the gardens in the 1920s. From the mid-fifties Diany Binny added the semi-circular pool in the lower garden and redesigned the white sunk garden. One of the finest accomplishments of its current owner, Anne Chambers, is the new water garden whose composition is ‘abstract modern’.

Our day concludes with another drive through the Cotswolds visiting the village of Bibury, described by William Morris as ‘the most beautiful village in the Cotswolds’. (Overnight Oxford) BL

 

Day 6: Sunday 17 May, Oxford & Steeple Ashton
•Rousham House and Gardens
•Guided tour of the University of Oxford Botanic Gardens with Dr Alison Foster, Senior Curator
•Magdalen College and its award-winning gardens

This morning we drive north of Oxford to Steeple Ashton to visit another stately home of very different aspect. Rousham House has remained the property of the Dormer family since its construction in 1635. The house retains much of its original panelling, staircases, furniture and art works. Several alterations were made in 1876 when the north side of the house was added, but for the most part Rousham remains a stunning example of 17th-century architecture and decoration. The gardens are of particular importance as they represent the first phase of English landscape design and have undergone few changes since being laid out by William Kent.

Following some time at leisure for lunch, we shall enjoy a walking tour of the magnificent University of Oxford Botanic Gardens with senior curator, Dr Alison Foster. Finally, we shall visit the award-winning gardens of 15th-century Magdalen College. Magdalen’s extensive grounds include its own deer park, wildflower meadow and a riverside walk. For Oscar Wilde, who matriculated at Magdalen in October 1874, ‘The Magdalen walks and cloisters’ were the ideal backdrop for reading Romantic poetry! (Overnight Oxford) B

 

Royal Tunbridge Wells – 1 night

Day 7: Monday 18 May, Oxford – West Green House Gardens – Sevenoaks – Royal Tunbridge Wells
•West Green House Gardens: Lunch & Guided tour of Gardens
•Ightham Mote, Sevenoaks

We depart Oxford early this morning and travel 60kms south to the Hart District of Northern Hampshire to visit West Green House Gardens that surround a lovely 18th-century house. These are the creation of an Australian, Marylyn Abbott. One could possibly call this a ‘biographical garden’ in the sense that it is a very personal creation based upon Marylyn’s early love of gardens, inculcated by her mother and grandmother when she was growing up in Australia (Marylyn masterminded the famous Australian garden, ‘Kennerton Green’). At West Green House she has reconciled her Australian gardening heritage, dominated by brilliant light, with England’s softer, more muted atmosphere. Marylyn is a prolific writer; her book The Resilient Garden, in keeping with her experience reconciling very different gardening environments, discusses a collection of plants that will acclimatise to both Mediterranean and cool temperate gardens. Her gardens appear in many publications, in one of which (The Royal Horticultural Society’s Garden Finder 2007) Charles Quest-Ritson has stated:

“West Green House Gardens has many original features. A grand water staircase provides the focal point to the Nymphaeum fountain designed by Quinlan Terry. By the house is a charming small topiary garden where water lilies flourish in small water tanks sunk in the ground. It runs up to a handsome aviary with unusual breeds of bantams and chickens. Beyond, are a dramatic new Persian water garden in a woodland glade, a newly restored lake, more follies and fancies, new walks and massive plantings of snowdrops, daffodils and fritillaries.”

Lavishness is a hallmark of the Abbott style – 10,000 tulip bulbs are planted every year – but Marylyn also emphasises the importance of drama, colour, innovation and humour in her garden.

Following a light lunch, we continue our journey east to Ightham Mote, a wonderful example of a small medieval moated manor house, perfectly located within a peaceful garden surrounded by woodland. Dating from the 14th century, this house has seen many changes but each subsequent section has been preserved in extraordinary condition. Medieval knights, courtiers to Henry VIII and high-society Victorians have all contributed sections to Ightham Mote. Highlights include the picturesque courtyard, Great Hall, crypt, Tudor painted ceiling, Grade I listed dog kennel and the private apartments of Charles Henry Robinson, who gave Ightham Mote to the National Trust in 1985. We shall walk to the house, enjoying its rural setting, before exploring its beautiful interior. Of special note is the chapel, with its perfectly preserved interior, pulpit and tester. We shall also enjoy the gardens, with an orchard, water features, lakes and woodland walks.

In the late afternoon we travel a short distance to Royal Tunbridge Wells, a town that rose to prominence when it became a spa in the late 17th century. Tonight we shall dine together at the hotel’s restaurant. (Overnight Royal Tunbridge Wells) BLD

 

London – 3 nights

Day 8: Tuesday 19 May, Royal Tunbridge Wells – Great Dixter – Sissinghurst – London
•Great Dixter House & Gardens
•Sissinghurst Castle Gardens

Today is a day of superb gardens. The Lloyd family developed Great Dixter early in the 20th century from an original design by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Today it is more famous for the plantings established by Christopher Lloyd documented in his many classic gardening books. The residence comprises a mid 15th-century hall house, typical of the Weald of Kent, to the south side of which a second, early 16th-century yeoman’s house was grafted. Lutyens enjoyed using local materials and retained farm buildings like oast houses, cowsheds, barns and outbuildings. Around these he designed his garden, featuring a sunken garden, topiary and yew hedges. Christopher Lloyd managed Great Dixter from the 1950s and was noted for his innovative approach and introduction of concepts like the mixed border and meadow garden, and his replacement of the rose garden with schemes using less fashionable plants like cannas and dahlias. We will investigate his full range of planting schemes. Although Lloyd is no longer present in the garden his gardener Fergus has achieved what some consider even better results in recent years.

We next drive to Sissinghurst Castle Garden, one of England’s greatest garden delights. Sissinghurst was the garden of poet and writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, journalist, MP and diplomat, and is possibly the most influential of all 20th-century gardens. Built around the remnants of an Elizabethan castle, of which the tower remains a central garden feature, the garden is divided into distinct spaces where a formality established by Nicolson is clothed by a romantic planting style pursued by Sackville-West. The garden retains its original charm and romance with such delights as its parterre, white garden, cottage garden, nut walk and orchard. We shall explore Sissinghurst’s many hidden corners, sumptuous planting combinations and the view from the top of the tower, always a good starting point for those who wish to understand the garden’s layout.

In the late afternoon we travel to London where we shall spend the next three nights at St Martins Lane hotel. (Overnight London) BL

 

Day 9: Wednesday 20 May, Chelsea Flower Show
•The Chelsea Flower Show (Members Day)
•The Garden Museum

Today is dedicated to the Chelsea Flower Show, the world’s best-known flower show. Located in the grounds of Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital (1689), the Show is held annually in May and attracts more tourists to London than the Wimbledon Championships! We will therefore arrive early in order to enjoy the remarkable displays before they become too crowded. All of the gardens on display are constructed in the two weeks prior to the show and, following the event, are dismantled and the grounds reinstated. Around the periphery of the grounds are display gardens, sponsored by newspapers and magazines, major stores and insurance companies, whilst inside the giant marquee are exhibits by plant growers. Here you will see perfect displays of everything horticultural from bonsai to bulbs, rhododendrons to roses. This visit has been designed so that you are free to wander through the event at your leisure, not forgetting the botanical art and floral displays. This is a visual feast that all gardeners will want to enjoy at least once in their lives!

In the mid afternoon we visit the nearby Garden Museum, which has recently been redeveloped and showcases an impressive collection and temporary exhibitions in its galleries. The museum, founded by Rosemary Nicholson in 1977, is housed in a former church and features a medieval tower with a view to Westminster. In what was formerly St Mary’s at Lambeth, this building dates back to the medieval era and is Britain’s only museum of garden history art and design. (Overnight London) B

 

Day 10: Thursday 21 May, London
•Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew – with Richard Barley, Director of Horticulture at Kew Gardens
•Farewell Lunch at the Botanical Restaurant, Kew Gardens
•Afternoon at leisure

Today is a unique opportunity to explore the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with Richard Barley, who was appointed Director of Horticulture at the Gardens in April 2013. With his knowledge based on the day-to-day management of the site, Richard will give deep insights into these world-renowned gardens. The original gardens were created for Augusta, Princess of Wales around her home, Kew Palace. Today it contains the largest collection of plants in the world with tropical and sub-tropical plants being kept in appropriate conditions in magnificent Victorian glasshouses. The variety of plants is overwhelming but Kew has a magic far above the ordinary run of Victorian plant collections, perhaps because of its size and the underlying but unobtrusive formality of its structure. The Queen’s Garden is a faithful copy of a 17th-century garden with parterres, sunken garden and pleached alleys. A new treetop walk by Marks Barfield Architects (who designed the London Eye) opened in May 2008.

Our day concludes with a farewell lunch at the Botanical Restaurant, housed in Museum No. 1 with stunning views to Palm Lake. The remainder of the afternoon is free for you to explore London at your leisure. (Overnight London) BL

 

Day 11: Friday 22 May, London, Tour Ends
•Airport transfer for participants departing on the ASA ‘designated’ flight

The tour ends in London. Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer to the airport to take their flight home to Australia. Alternatively, you may wish to extend your stay in London. Please contact ASA if you require further assistance. B

The above itinerary describes a range of gardens and estates which we plan to visit. Many are accessible to the public, but others require special permission which may only be confirmed closer to the tour’s departure in 2020. The daily activities described in this itinerary may change or be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate alterations in opening hours, flight schedules and confirmation of private visits. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents prior to departure. Meals included in the tour price and are indicated in the itinerary where: B=breakfast, L=Lunch and D=evening meal

Natural Landscapes & Gardens of Morocco

Tour Highlights

** 1 ROOM REMAINING**

•This tour, led by John Patrick, horticulturalist, garden designer and former presenter on ABC TV’s Gardening Australia is a feast of splendid gardens, great monuments and natural landscapes of Morocco.
•In Tangier, with the assistance of François Gilles, the UK’s most respected importer of Moroccan carpets, spend two days visiting a variety of private gardens and learn about the world of Moroccan interiors.
•While based in a charming dar in Taroudant for 5 days, view the work of French landscape designers Arnaud Maurières and Éric Ossart, exploring their garden projects designed for a dry climate.
•View the stunning garden of Umberto Pasti, a well-known Italian novelist and horticulturalist, whose garden is a ‘magical labyrinth of narrow paths, alleyways and walled enclosures’.
•Visit the gardens of the late Christopher Gibbs, a British antique dealer and collector who was also an influential figure in men’s fashion and interior design in 1960s London. His gorgeous cliff-side compound is set in 14 acres of plush gardens.
•Enjoy lunch at the private residence of interior designer Veere Grenney.
•In Marrakesh, visit Yves Saint Laurent Museum, Jardin Majorelle, the Jardin Secret, the palmeraie Jnane Tamsna, André Heller’s Anima, Beldi Country Club and take afternoon tea in the gardens of La Mamounia – one of the most famous hotels in the world.
•Explore the work of American landscape architect, Madison Cox, with a visit to Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s private gardens of the Villa Oasis and gardens of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakesh.
•Wander through the UNESCO World Heritage-listed medinas of Fes and Tetouan.
•Delight all your senses in Marrakesh’s teeming, colourful souqs, with their textiles, jewellery, carpets, carved woodwork, acrobats, snake charmers, letter writers and fortune tellers.
•Journey across the pre-Sahara and through huge date palm plantations of verdant oasis river valleys.
•Encounter the rich urban architecture of Andalusian mosques and madrasas, and desert mud-brick qasbas and villages.
•Cross Morocco’s majestic Middle, High and Anti Atlas mountain ranges and past small Berber mountain villages.
•Eat fine local food in old palaces whilst listening to exquisite Andalusian music.
•Stay in charming riads in Fes and in Marrakesh – lovingly restored by local artisans and located in the medina.

22-day Cultural Garden Tour of Morocco

Overnight Rabat (1 night) • Tangier (3 nights) • Chefchaouen (1 night) • Fes (3 nights) • Merzouga (1 night) • Tineghir (1 night) • Ouarzazate (1 night) • Marrakesh (5 nights) • Taroudant (5 nights)

Overview

This 22-day cultural garden tour of Morocco is led by John Patrick, former presenter on ABC TV’s Gardening Australia and expert in Australian and Mediterranean gardens. The tour explores the dynamic relationship between Morocco’s unique and diverse environments and the country’s gardening traditions. It focuses on five key themes: the tradition of the Andalusian courtyard garden; the cultivation of date plantations and palmeraies in the desert and in the south around Marrakesh; the creation of ecologically sustainable desert gardens; the cultivation of gardens and plantations in high mountain locations, and the innovations of expatriates in garden design. We travel from the rich, well-watered coastal plain across the Atlas mountains to the arid pre-Sahara, and then south for our five-day program to study landscape design projects by Arnaud Maurières and Éric Ossart and the ecology of the Taroudant region. In the grand, medieval Imperial cities of Fes and Marrakesh we will be introduced not only to traditional ‘Andalusian’ courtyard gardens but also to the latest in garden design. In cosmopolitan Tangiers, Morocco’s equivalent of the Côte d’Azur, we explore the wonderful houses and gardens of international expatriates. Beyond the Atlas Mountains we encounter rich palm oases that follow rivers as they snake through the empty desert. These extraordinary ‘rivers of green’ are complemented by luscious vegetable gardens in small villages. Here we learn how precious water is shared amongst the village farmers. We stay in a desert house before crossing the High Atlas to Marrakesh, the red city of the south. Here we enjoy extraordinary gardens like that of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé in which verdant plants contrast with vivid blue buildings. Further south we encounter powerful contrasts between lowland and mountain plantings, observing many of Morocco’s unique flora as well as imported and acclimatised specimens. We’ll also come to understand how traditional architecture relates to its garden armature, and how contemporary architects, gardeners and plantsmen have adapted traditional relationships to create new, fascinating environments. To complement this fascinating study of the relationship between diverse ecologies and garden design, we’ll learn about the unique history of Morocco, its artistic and architectural traditions. Fes is arguably the least changed medieval city in the world, with lovely 15th-century madrasas and funduks (caravanserai). In exploring Morocco’s vivid craft traditions, we’ll learn how traditional plant dyes are used in carpets, textiles, the colouring of leather and in painting. We’ll come to understand the vital influence of Iberia upon Morocco’s development and how the countries six great dynasties, the Idrissi, Almoravids, Almohads, Merinids, Sa’adi and Alawi have interacted with Mediterranean Europe. We’ll wander through souqs selling all manner of wares from fine copper to carved wood, textiles, ceramics and Morocco’s ubiquitous carpets and also have ample opportunities to sample Morocco’s fine cuisine in a number of carefully selected restaurants.

Preliminary Itinerary – Garden visits to be confirmed later in 2019

Rabat – 1 night

Day 1: Tuesday 14 April, Arrive Casablanca – Rabat
•Arrival transfer from Casablanca to Rabat
•Welcome Dinner at the Hotel

Our tour commences in Rabat. Upon arrival in Casablanca, participants taking ASA’s ‘designated’ flight will drive by private coach to our hotel in Rabat, the capital of Morocco. Those taking alternative flights should meet the group at Casablanca airport or at the Riad Kalaa and Riad Kalaa 2. Tonight we enjoy a welcome dinner at the hotel. (Overnight Rabat) D

Tangier – 3 nights

Day 2: Wednesday 15 April, Rabat – Tangier
•Royal Palace (exterior)
•Hassan Tower
•Marinid Necropolis of Chellah
•Welcome Drinks at the residence of Elena Prentice with interior designer François Gilles, Tangier

Rabat is situated on the southern bank of the Bu Regreg River, across from the town of Salé. A Roman town existed in the vicinity but modern Rabat is a Muslim foundation. The name ‘Rabat’ comes from the Arabic word ribat, which means a fort on the Islamic frontier, usually manned by Muslims as a religious duty. Such a fort existed on the site of modern Rabat by the 10th century. Rabat’s earliest monuments built after the Romans, however, date from the Almohad period (1147-1248). The Almohads expanded the settlement by building a qasba (kasbah), or fortress, during the reign of ‘Abd al-Mu’min, the second leader of the Almohad movement. ‘Abd al-Mu’min’s grandson, Ya’qub al-Mansur, transformed Rabat into his capital by constructing a six-kilometre defensive wall around the town, and initiating the construction of the huge Hassan Mosque.

We begin today with a visit to the Hassan Mosque and view the exterior of the Royal Palace. The official residence of King Hassan II of Morocco, this sumptuous building is constructed upon the ruins of an 18th-century palace. It is surrounded by vast lawns with various trees and brilliantly coloured flower beds.

All that remains of the Hassan Mosque is a series of huge columns from its hypostyle prayer hall and the huge Hassan Tower, originally the mosque’s minaret. The vast size of the Hassan Mosque gives a measure of the ambition of its founder, the Almohad Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur; when he died, the mosque, which would have been the largest in the world, was never completed. The minaret (1195-1196), stands to the north of the mosque’s forecourt on an axis with its mihrab in order to emphasise the mosque’s orientation. It was meant to be one of the highest minarets in the world, although its upper section was never built. The Hassan Tower, with the beautiful decorative screen-work on its upper façade, provided the model for the Giralda of Seville and the minaret of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh. The mausoleum of Muhammad V, an example of modern Moroccan architecture, is located at the south end of the Hassan Mosque site.

We then visit the Chellah, a medieval fortified necropolis built on the ruins of the Roman town. Inside are beautifully landscaped gardens with hundreds of flowers that come into bloom during springtime. The result is an amazing variety of scents. We may also view Roman ruins and the remains of a small mosque and madrasa.

Following lunch at a local seafood restaurant we drive from Rabat to Tangier where we shall spend the next three nights at the Hotel El Minzah. Built in the 1930s, this beautiful hotel is decorated in the traditional Moorish style and is surrounded by ample gardens.

Tangier is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Morocco. Founded by the Phoenicians (c.1100 BC) it was subsequently incorporated into the Roman Empire as Tingis, capital of the province of Mauretania Tingitania. With Rome’s decline (4th century AD) it became the only surviving Roman town of any consequence in Morocco. Temporarily lost during the Vandal invasions, Tingis was recaptured by the Byzantines in the 6th century.

In the late 7th century, Tingis was captured by Muslim armies and transformed into the garrison and port of Tangier. It served as a stepping-stone for Muslim attacks on the Iberian peninsula (Spain & Portugal). When the Castilians and Portuguese eventually reconquered Iberia and began attacking north Africa, Tangier became a regular victim of Portuguese raids and was finally captured late in the 15th century. The Portuguese monarchy ceded it to Britain in the 17th century as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza, wife of Charles II. But the expense of retaining Tangier against constant Muslim attacks persuaded the British to withdraw in 1684 and Tangier again became a Muslim city. Morocco’s ‘Alawi dynasty added new defences and a qasba and Tangier became a small port trading with Cadiz and other Spanish ports. In the 19th century, Tangier became the ‘City of the Consuls’, the residence of European diplomats and it became an ‘international zone’ in the early 20th century during the French Protectorate. Tangier gained a shady reputation for espionage, prostitution and drug-smuggling. Since Independence in 1956 the city has been gradually re-integrated into the Moroccan cultural mainstream, although it still has a large expatriate community, especially of writers, artists and gardeners.

This evening we enjoy welcome drinks with François Gilles. François is a London-based interior designer who has been sourcing Moroccan textiles for over 30 years. American expatriate Elena Prentice is kindly opening her house and garden overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar to host the welcome event. Elena Prentice is a painter and has exhibited extensively in museums and important collections worldwide, and has taught at The National Academy of Design in New York. She also ran the American Legation Museum, in Tangier, which we visit tomorrow. We return to the Hotel El Minzah for our evening meal. (Overnight Tangier) BLD

Day 3: Thursday 16 April, Tangier
•Cape Malabata
•American Legation
•Palace Moulay Hafid, Mersha
•Lunch at the Hôtel Nord-Pinus
•Dar Al Makhzan Museum
•Jalobey, private garden of Mounira el Alami (to be confirmed in 2020)

When, in 1923, Tangier was declared an international zone the city began to attract artists, poets, and philosophers, much as the Côte d’Azur did on the other side of the Mediterranean. Henri Matisse, William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Paul and Jane Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith and Allen Ginsberg were all inspired by Tangier. Foreign residents, many of them artists, today own some of its most stylish homes. Foreign residents include the American painter Elena Prentice, the Italian interior designer Roberto Peregalli and the American garden designer Madison Cox. “It is alarming,” Truman Capote wrote, “the number of travellers who have landed here on a brief holiday, then settled down and let the years go by”.

In the company of François Gilles, we begin the day at Cape Malabata, located 6 miles east of Tangier, for a morning view (with the sun behind us) of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Returning to the heart of Tangier, we take a short tour through the old town where traces of Tangier’s intimate relations with Europe abound. Many consular buildings, such as the American Legation, dot its narrow streets and its architectural styles bear witness to ongoing northern Mediterranean influence.

The American legation is an elaborate Moorish-style building of stuccoed masonry. This complex structure contains the two storey mud and stone building presented to the United States in 1821 by Sultan Moulay Suliman. The first property acquired abroad by the United States government, it housed the United States Legation and Consulate for 140 years, the longest period any building abroad has been occupied as a United States diplomatic post.

Today it is the Tangier American Institute for Moroccan Studies, a museum and cultural centre for the study of Morocco and Morocco-United States relations. The museum holds an impressive display of paintings that give a view of the Tangerine past through the eyes of its artists, most notably Scotsman James McBey, whose hypnotic painting of his servant girl, Zohra, has been called the Moroccan Mona Lisa. There is also a wing dedicated to the expatriate writer and composer Paul Bowles.

We then visit the renovated Palace Moulay Hafid, considered the most beautiful historical monument in Tangier. Also known as the ‘Palace of Italian institutions’, Moulay Hafid’s palace is today admired for its beautiful garden with old trees, its large patio with a gorgeous marble fountain and stucco salons.

This palace was built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Sultan Moulay Hafid. He wanted his palace to be a masterpiece of Moorish architecture also known for its beautiful gardens. The namesake of the palace, the sultan, never lived in his grand palace as he was forced into exile in France upon signing the treaty of Fez on 30 March 1912. This treaty would see Morocco become a French protectorate, and Moulay Hafid’s abdication and forced exile to France. The sultan did however demand the completion of this palace as a condition of his signing the deed of protectorate and construction was completed in late 1912.

Following lunch at Hôtel Nord-Pinus, a renovated pasha’s palace overlooking Tangier’s old port, we visit the Dar Al Makhzan Museum of Moroccan Arts located in the ‘Alawi governor’s residence and its Andalusian garden. Then we visit the garden of Jalobey with its current owner Mounira el Alami. In the early 30ths, artists Marguerite et James McBey bought a house and a large dilapidated garden on the Old Mountain Road overlooking Tangier and the Straits of Gibraltar. They restored the house and the garden and renamed it “Jalobey” from an amalgam of their own names. (Overnight Tangier) BL

Day 4: Friday 17 April, Tangier
•Cape Spartel Lighthouse
•Private gardens of Umberto Pasti
•Private gardens of the late Christopher Gibbs
•Lunch at the private residence of Veere Greeney
•Afternoon tea at the private residence of Daniel Aron

We spend another day with François Gilles visiting private gardens in the lush hills of the area known as la Montagne. It is here that foreign home owners such as Madison Cox tend their magnificent gardens; Tangier is a landscaper’s paradise because just about any plant will thrive.

We begin with a short drive to Cape Spartel, which lies 14 kilometres west of Tangier. This is the northwestern extremity of Africa’s Atlantic Coast. A dramatic drive takes us through la Montagne and over the pine-covered headland to the Cape Spartel Lighthouse.

In the Nouvelle-Montagne we visit the stunning residence and garden of Umberto Pasti, a well-known Italian novelist and horticulturalist. Pasti’s garden is a magical labyrinth of narrow paths, alleyways and walled enclosures. Plants of eucalyptus, palms and bitter orange trees provide peaceful shade from the burning rays of the Moroccan sun. Lush vegetation, fountains and frog song are the only sign of life in this world of tranquility.

Nearby, in the Vieille-Montagne (‘old mountain’), we visit the private gardens of the late Christopher Gibbs, a British antique dealer and collector who was also an influential figure in men’s fashion and interior design in 1960s London. His gorgeous cliff-side compound, which is set in 14 acres of plush gardens, includes a century-old water garden. Garden designer Sabrina Hahn describes the garden as: “A lovely free flowing garden with lots of greenery, palms, murraya and iceberg roses hedging and spring flowering perennials. Pots are filled with geranium Maderense, hollyhocks and gaura.”

Across the road, lunch will be served at the private residence of Veere Greeney, a New Zealand born interior designer, whose garden provides a unique view of Gibraltar. In this garden, long paved avenues are edged with very old transplanted olive trees. Hardy perennials like sage, helichrysum, perennial salvias euphorbia and large urns are filled with geraniums and annuals.

We finish the day with a visit to the garden of award-winning French photographer Daniel Aron, known for his visuals of the Hermes brand and work for Harper’s Bazaar (USA), Vogue France, House and Garden (USA) and Elle (France). (Overnight Tangier) BL

Chefchaouen – 1 night

Day 5: Saturday 18 April, Tangier – Tetouan – Chefchaouen
•Medina of Tetouan
•The Royal Artisan School, Tetouan (Dar Sanaa)
•Old Town of Chefchaouen

Today we travel along the picturesque mountain road from Tangier to Chefchaouen, a small town nestling in a deep, narrow valley at the western end of the Rif mountains, where we spend the night.

We break our journey in the city of Tetouan, situated on the slopes of the fertile Martil Valley. Tetouan, from the Berber word tit’ta’ouin means ‘springs’, which explains the greenery of the town, its many fountains, its flowering gardens and its surrounding fertile plains. The city was of particular importance from the 8th century onwards as it served as the main point of contact between Morocco and Andalusia. After the Spanish Reconquest, the town was rebuilt by Andalusian refugees who had been expelled by Isabella and Ferdinand (1492). This is reflected in its art and architecture, which reveal clear Andalusian influences.

Tetouan’s ancient walled medina is a UNESCO World Heritage site whose houses reflect a rich aristocratic tradition. Their tiled lintels, wrought-iron balconies, courtyard gardens and extravagant interiors have a lot in common with the old Muslim quarters of Córdoba or Seville. Despite subsequent conquests, the medina has remained largely intact and one of the most complete in Morocco. Inside the medina proper are most of Tetouan’s food and crafts souqs, including the Souk el-Hots where Berber rugs and foutas (woven cotton cloth) are sold. Throughout Morocco we will find carpets, textiles and leather that are dyed with natural pigments that are derived from indigenous plants. Deftly woven carpets, expertly crafted leatherwork, intricately carved woodwork, superbly tooled metal work, colourful tiles and exquisite ceramics are all to be found in Tetouan. We visit Dar Sanaa, the Royal Artisan School where local children are apprenticed to masters for 4 years of intense training in traditional artisan work (this school is typically closed on weekends, but we can still visit its workshops).

‘Chefchaouen’ is a Berber name, meaning ‘two horns’, which refers to two rocky peaks that dominate the town. The town was founded in the 15th century by a descendant of the Prophet, called Mawlay ‘Ali ibn Rashid, and refugees from Spain who sought to create a mountain stronghold where they would be safe at last from the Christians. Around 1760 Sultan Mohammed Ben Abdallah (Mohammed III) ordered the Jewish families to move into the medina, their mellah (walled Jewish quarter of a city) taking in the area that today encompasses the southern quarter between the qasba and Bab el Aïn. Until this century, Chefchaouen was completely closed to Europeans, who risked their lives if they tried to enter its gates.

The Hispanic origin of Chefchaouen’s inhabitants is clearly evident in the architecture of this little town which has much in common with villages of southern Spain. Small, whitewashed ochre houses with balconies, windows covered by ornate metal grilles, tiled roofs and Andalusian-style courtyards, pile up upon one another. Chefchaouen’s famous shades of blue arose when the Jews added indigo into the whitewash to contrast the mellah against the traditional green of Islam. The town’s stone-built Friday mosque resembles rural Spanish churches. The focus of town life is the central plaza where the inhabitants promenade in the balmy dusk air. In the early evening there will be an optional walk to explore the old town of Chefchaouen. (Overnight Chefchaouen) BLD

Fes – 4 nights

Day 6: Sunday 19 April, Chefchaouen – Volubilis – Fes
•Roman Site of Volubilis

Today we travel south from Chefchaouen to Fes via Volubilis. The Roman city of Volubilis was built in the 1st century BC on the site of earlier Prehistoric and Phoenician settlements when Morocco and Algeria were incorporated into the Roman Empire as the client kingdom of Mauretania. The kingdom was ruled by Juba II, the Roman-educated son of its vanquished Berber ruler. Juba II was a classmate of both Octavian and Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Antony and Cleopatra. When Octavian became Augustus, he married Juba II to Cleopatra Selene, and made them client rulers of Mauretania. They founded two capitals: Caesarea in Eastern Algeria and Volubilis in Morocco. The wealth of Volubilis was based on local production of grain, olive oil and copper which were exported to the rest of the empire.

In 40 AD Caligula had Juba’s son, Ptolemy, assassinated. Mauretania went into revolt only to be formally annexed to Rome and made into the directly-governed province of Mauretania Tingitania. The wealth of Volubulis’ agricultural hinterland ensured its ongoing importance to the Romans. Despite the shrinking Roman presence in Morocco from the 3rd century onwards, Volubilis probably remained partly Romanised until the 7th century.

We visit the ruins of Volubilis, which is set in broad wheat bearing plains as it was in the Roman period. Its monuments include the well-preserved Basilica and Arch of Caracalla and there is a fine collection of very important Roman mosaic floors. We also explore the House of Orpheus, the Baths of Gallienus, the Forum, the Temple of Saturn and a number of houses. From Volubilis we travel southeast into the fertile Sais plain to the city of Fes, where we shall spend the next few nights. (Overnight Fes) BLD

Introduction to Fes

Fes is the oldest of Morocco’s imperial cities and is still its historic religious and cultural centre. Fes is actually composed of three discrete entities: Fes al-Bali (old Fes), wedged into the narrow valley of the Wad Fes (River Fes); Fes al-Jadid (New Fes), originally a royal complex; and the Ville Nouvelle (New Town), the modern French-built section of the city.

Fes al-Bali, was founded by Idris I around 799. His son, Idris II made Fes his capital in 809 and its population was swelled by immigrants from other Arabo-Islamic lands. Fes soon became an important centre for religious scholarship, commerce and artisanship. Fes benefited from its position at the juncture of land trade routes to and from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic east.

The 11th-12th century Almoravid dynasty conquered North Morocco and incorporated Muslim Spain into its empire. Although the Almoravids founded Marrakesh as their capital in 1070, they also built mosques, baths, funduqs (multi-storey lodging houses for merchants and their wares), and fountains in Fes. Many Hispano-Muslim artisans moved to Fes to work on Almoravid buildings, which were renowned for their stuccowork decoration.

After 1154 the Almohads gave the city new walls which still define the limits of Fes al-Bali to the present day. The Qarawiyyin Mosque could now hold approximately 20,000 worshippers. The Qarawiyyin is quite different to Hispano-Muslim mosques and medieval European cathedral architecture for despite its vast size it hides within the narrow streets of the city and has no defined exterior or monumental façade.

In the 1240s the Marinid dynasty replaced the Almohads and fought against the Christians in Spain. Moroccan rulers henceforth dedicated themselves to holy war (jihad) against the aggressive Christians. Much of Fes’ exquisite architecture dates from the Marinid period (13th-15th century). They amalgamated Moroccan and Hispanic elements in a style subsequently known as ‘Andalusian’, which remains dominant in Fes and other Moroccan cities to this day. The Marinids built the royal complex of Fes al-Jadid which included palaces, mosques and residential quarters for the sultan’s troops. They commissioned a series of palaces and funduqs in Fes al-Bali and introduced the ‘madrasa’ or theological college to Morocco, constructing a series of wonderful madrasas in Fes. These madrasas have a central courtyard, a prayer hall, and several storeys of student rooms wrapped around the courtyard and prayer hall. They are all decorated in the distinctive registers of carved cedarwood, stuccowork, and mosaic tile, a hallmark of the Moroccan Andalusian style. The Marinids also created the shrine of Idris II.

In the 15th century Morocco broke up into small principalities ruled by strong men able to resist Spanish and Portuguese aggression. Fes’ cultural and commercial life was nevertheless enriched by Jewish and Hispano-Muslim migrants fleeing Spain. Fes consequently maintained its religious and cultural importance despite the 16th-century Sa’di dynasty’s choice of Marrakesh as their capital. The ‘Alawi sultans also recognised the importance of Fes and added palaces, fortifications and the Jewish quarter (mellah).

Day 7: Monday 20 April, Fes
•Burj al-Janub
•Al-Andalus Mosque
•Sahrij Madrasa
•The Dyers’ Street
•The Tanneries
•Souqs of Fes
•Museum Dar Batha
•Lunch at Le Jardin des Biehn
•Dinner at La Maison Bleue

We start today with a visit to the Burj al-Janub, or South Tower, which gives a panoramic view of Fes from the alternate side to the North Tower. We then explore Fes al-Bali visiting the al-Andalus quarter; Marinid madrasas in the city; areas of artisanal production and the souqs, or markets.

In Fes al-Bali we visit the Dar Batha Museum, a collection of antique Moroccan woodwork, marblework and other craftwork housed in a converted ‘Alawi palace. This museum contains the original carved wood doors of some of Fes’ madrasas and a marble doorway from the Sa’di palace in Marrakesh, along with many other artefacts which demonstrate Moroccan adaptation of Hispano-Muslim styles. The palace’s garden shaded with citrus trees and perfumed with orange blossom, red roses and sweet-scented jasmine, provided a serene escape from the bustling medina. Its layout is based on the principles of charbagh – a Persian-style garden where the quadrilateral layout is divided by walkways or flowing water that intersect at the garden’s centre. In Persian, char means ‘four’ and bagh means ‘garden’. This highly structured geometrical scheme, became a powerful metaphor for the organisation and domestication of the landscape, itself a symbol of political territory. The gardens were restored by landscape architect, Carey Duncan in 2005. Duncan worked with Cotecno and Architect Raffael Gorjux from Italy recreating the Andalusian Garden while keeping existing large trees, but replanting the undergrowth which was either bare or overtaken by weeds, and revitalising the existing planting.

The al-Andalus quarter lies on the eastern side of the Wad Fes, and has its own great mosque with a dramatic monumental gateway with a horseshoe arch. One of the most beautiful Marinid madrasas in Morocco, the Sahrij Madrasa, is located close by. The small, perfectly proportioned courtyard of the madrasa is tiled with turquoise-tinted tiles whose colour is picked up and reflected by the large central pool. This intimate space is enclosed by carved wood screens.

From the Sahrij we descend to the river and cross to the Qarawiyyin quarter of the city to see the street of the dyers and the tanneries. Every morning, when the tanneries are at their most active, cascades of water pour through holes that were once the windows of houses. Here, hundreds of skins lie spread out on the rooftops to dry, while amid the vats of dye and pigeon dung tanners treat the hides. The rotation of colours in the honeycombed vats follows a traditional sequence – yellow (supposedly ‘saffron’, in fact turmeric), red (poppy), blue (indigo), green (mint) and black (antimony) – although vegetable dyes have largely been replaced by chemicals, to the detriment of workers’ health. This ‘innovation’ and the occasional rinsing machine aside, there can have been little change here since the sixteenth century, when Fes replaced Córdoba as the pre-eminent city of leather production.

During the day we break for lunch at Le Jardin des Biehn, a large Andalusian garden in the middle of the medina, scented by Isfahan roses, jasmine, orange blossom and bergamot. The gardens, surrounded by a former 20th-century summer palace, were redeveloped by Michel Biehn. Its quadrants are divided by mosaic paths, with tingling streams and fountains, and include flowers, aromatic herbs, fruits and vegetables.

Dinner tonight will be at La Maison Bleue restaurant, a traditional Moroccan residence built in 1915 by Sidi Mohammed El Abbadi, a judge and astronomer. (Overnight Fes) BLD

Day 8: Tuesday 21 April, Fes
•Palace and Andalusian Gardens of Fes, including the Jnane Sbil Garden (Bou Jeloud Garden)
•Lunch at Restaurant NUR
•Bu ‘Inaniyya Madrasa
•Qarawiyyin Mosque (exterior)
•Shrine of Mawlay Idris II (exterior)
•‘Attarin Madrasa
•Fondouk el-Nejjarine

Fes was one of the first cities in the world to build a water distribution network which enabled it to develop the art of gardening. This morning we return to Fes’ medina for a walking tour which explores the city’s palaces and Andalusian gardens.

The 19th-century Jnane Sbil Park (formerly Bou Jeloud Gardens), covering an area of 7.5 hectares, underwent 4 years of extensive renovations and was reopened in 2012. Renovations works included the rehabilitation of its old and ingenious hydraulic systems (including fountains, seguias, channels and norias), restoration of the central boulevard and bamboo garden, as well as the creation of the Garden of Scents. The Oued Fes (Fes river) and the Oued Jawahir (river of pearls) flowed through the garden; a water wheel remains as a reminder of how the medieval city provided power to its craftsmen and their workshops.

From Jnane Sbil Gardens we proceed through the vividly decorated Bab Bou Jeloud Gate to Fes al-Bali, unique in its maintenance of an urban plan dating to the ninth century. The narrowness of its steep, winding streets means that motor vehicles may not enter and donkeys, mules and handcarts still transport food and merchandise around the city. Many of the religious, domestic and commercial structures lining the streets date to the fourteenth century, providing a unique insight into the physical experience of living in a medieval city.

Midday we dine at Restaurant NUR which operates as a venue for an intriguing new visiting-chef-in-residence project. Each visiting chef is invited to create a daily menu based on seasonal produce sourced from Fes’s central market or nearby farms. The restaurant is owned by Stephen di Renza, a former fashion director for Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, who divides his time between Fes and Marrakesh where he is the creative director for the Jardin Majorelle.

Following lunch we visit the 14th-century Bu ‘Inaniyya Madrasa and the ‘Attarin Madrasa, built around 1325. The ‘Attarin is a relatively small and intimate madrasa decorated with rich tile work. Both madrasas served as residences for students at the great mosques of Fes rather than as teaching centres.

We also visit the Qarawiyyin Mosque and the shrine of Mawlay Idris II. The two buildings form the sacred core of the city, and the prestigious markets for perfumes, spices and silk garments are located nearby adding pungency and fragrance to the air. Although non-Muslims may not enter these buildings, we can view their interiors through their gateways.

Finally we visit the Fondouk el-Nejjarine, home to the Museum of Wooden Arts and Crafts which showcases the skill of woodcarvers and artists both in the embellishments of the building and the intricately decorated items on display. Various types of timber are used in Moroccan woodcarving, including oak, mahogany, acacia and cedar, with the latter being one of the most popular, most likely due to its availability in Morocco, particularly in the Middle Atlas regions, but also because of its durability, warm shades of color and its texture which is particularly suited to carving. Declared a national monument in 1916, the funduq was originally built in the 18th century as a caravanserai (roadside inn) where travellers could rest before continuing their, sometimes arduous, journey. These buildings, which are found throughout Morocco, were typically built in a square or rectangular shape around an inner courtyard, usually with a fountain in the middle creating an oasis from the Moroccan heat. (Overnight Fes) BL

Merzouga – 1 night

Day 9: Wednesday 22 April, Fes – Ifrane – Midelt – Merzouga
•Ifrane
•Midelt

Today we travel from Fes to Merzouga, on the edge of the Sahara, through the Middle Atlas mountains. We shall pass through Ifrane, a small mountain town built by the French to escape the summer heat of the plains. The town is famous for its luscious gardens. Just outside Ifrane we drive through huge cedar forests, second only to those of Lebanon. These forests provided the wood to be carved into the magnificent decoration of Moroccan monuments. From Ifrane we will drive to Midelt through some of Morocco’s most magnificent scenery in which broad high plains are framed everywhere by snow-capped mountains.

Midelt, where we eat lunch, marks the start of one of the main routes through the eastern High Atlas mountains to the Sahara. This route was carved through the mountains by the Wad Ziz, a river which snakes south alongside the road. As we drive south the cedars and oaks of the north gradually give way to barren rock, clusters of date palms marking water sources, and finally the sand of the desert. We emerge from the mountains into the fertile Ziz Valley down which vast numbers of date palms stretch to the horizon like brilliant green rivers; dates are a Moroccan staple and one of the country’s major exports, (Overnight Merzouga) BLD

Tineghir – 1 night

Day 10: Thursday 23 April, Merzouga – Rissani – Erfoud – Tineghir
•Dawn Camel Excursion (Optional)
•Tomb of Mawlay ‘Ali al-Sharif, Rissani
•Rissani Market
•Moroccan khettara

After an optional dawn excursion to the sand dunes of Merzouga to watch the sunrise, we depart for Rissani, the capital of the province of Tafilalt and ancestral home of the ‘Alawi dynasty. Rissani lies alongside the ruins of the early Islamic town of Sijilmassa which controlled Moroccan trade with sub-Saharan Africa from the early 8th century until the 14th century. Sijilmassa’s vast ruins reflect the wealth of this medieval city, but by the 16th century it was no more than one of a number of fortified mud-brick villages (qsars). These mud-brick villages are composed of many small houses wedged together whose outer walls form a continuous outer rampart through which a single ornate portal provides access to the village. The modern town of Rissani, constructed this century, itself grew out of the largest set of local qsars.

The ‘Alawi dynasty’s founder Mawlay ‘Ali al-Sharif died a hero fighting the Portuguese in North Morocco. His tomb in Tafilalt became a local shrine, set amid date palms, irrigation canals and brilliant green qsar gardens. We shall visit the mausoleum of Mawlay ‘Ali al-Sharif (gardens only) and the Ksar Oulad Abdelhalim, a restored 18th-century kasbah or fortified house. In Rissani’s Thursday market, we may view wandering traders, nomads, Berbers and Arab desert dwellers who come to sell all kinds of clothing, wares, plants, spices and vegetables, and animals.

After lunch in Erfoud, we take the Tinjdad road west to the town of Tineghir at the mouth of the Tudgha Gorge. This road marks the start of the Route of the Qasbas, so-called because of the many fortified houses, or qasbas, which line its edges. Along the way we stop to view part of the 300-kilometre network of khettara (qanat) – subsurface irrigation channels which were excavated in the Tafilalt basin beginning in the late 14th century. More than 75 of these chains provided perennial water following the breakup of the ancient city of Sijilmassa. Khettara continued to function for much of the northern oasis until the early 1970s, when new technologies and government policies forced changes. (Overnight Tineghir) BLD

Ouarzazate – 1 night

Day 11: Friday 24 April, Tineghir – Tudgha Gorge – Taourirt – Ouarzazate
•Tudgha Gorge
•Qsars of Tineghir
•Qasba de Taourirt

Near Tineghir the High Atlas meets the Jabal Saghru, a small massif which is part of the Anti Atlas range. The deep gorges of Tudgha and Dades mark the fault line between these two mountain ranges. Both gorges were carved out of the rock by torrents of melt water from the peaks above them. As they widen, small terraces of crops line each watercourse and villages cling to their sides, placed above the line of the torrential meltwaters which can close the gorges in spring. Here the mud-brick is the same brilliant red as the soil, creating a striking contrast to the rich green crops.

This morning we head up the spectacular Tudgha Gorge. En route we shall take a leisurely walk through one of the rich, cultivated areas nestling on the banks of the Wad Tudgha. We then return to Tineghir to visit the qsar (fortified village) and have lunch. After our meal we shall take the Route of the Qasbas and continue west.

This afternoon we visit the Qasba of Taourirt located in the town of Ouarzazate. Built late in the 19th century, the qasba became important in the 1930s when the local Glawi dynasty’s powers were at their peak. The qasba was never actually resided in by the Glawi chiefs but rather by their second tier of command, including their sons and cousins and their massive entourages of extended family members, servants, builders, and craftsmen. The qasba has close to 300 rooms grouped in more than 20 riads (apartments). (Overnight Ouarzazate) BLD

Marrakesh – 5 nights

Day 12: Saturday 25 April, Ouarzazate – Ait Ben Haddu – Marrakesh
•Ksar of Ait Ben Haddu
•Tiz n’Tishka Pass

This morning we drive to Ait Ben Haddu, one of the fortified villages under control of the Glawi family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Located in the foothills of the High Atlas, Ait Ben Haddu is the most famous qsar in the Ounila Valley, and a striking example of southern Moroccan architecture. This fortified village in its dramatic landscape is regularly used as settings for films.

This afternoon we cross the High Atlas by way of the Tiz n’Tishka Pass to Marrakesh, leaving behind the landscapes of the pre-Sahara with its pisé qasbas and qsars, the verdant palm groves of the Ziz valleys, and the rocky drama of the gorges. (Overnight Marrakesh) BLD

Introduction to Marrakesh

Marrakesh is the 3rd imperial city we visit, founded in 1070 by the Almoravid Abu Bakr. He chose the site because it was well watered and flat: perfect as a camping ground for the Almoravid army, composed of nomads from the Sahara. Marrakesh began as the perfect springboard for the Almoravid conquest of North Morocco, but it soon became the Almoravid capital by virtue of its location on the trans-Saharan trade route.

After the Almoravids had conquered much of Spain, a period of cultural and artistic exchange ensued bringing the sophisticated urban culture of al-Andalus (Iberia) to Marrakesh. All that remains of Almoravid Marrakesh is an exquisite qubba, (domed chamber), which may indicate the site of the lost Almoravid great mosque of Marrakesh.

In 1147 Marrakesh fell to the Almohads, who then captured North Morocco, Muslim Spain, and North Africa as far as Tunis. The most famous Almohad ruler, Ya’qub al-Mansur, builder of the Qasba of the Udaya and Hassan Tower in Rabat and the Giralda of Seville, constructed a spectacular Almohad great mosque (1190), sister to the great mosques of Rabat and Seville here. The mosque soon became known as the Kutubiyya, or Booksellers’ Mosque, as a result of the book market which grew up in its shadow.

The minaret of the Kutubiyya is one of the most important extant Almohad buildings as the only Almohad minaret which has survived intact. Like the Hassan Tower, the minaret’s façades are decorated with intricate screen work, punctuated on the upper levels with small windows. It is crowned with a small domed pavilion surmounted with a gold spike holding three gold balls and a crescent, and gives an impression of how the Hassan Tower would have looked. Ya’qub al-Mansur also enclosed the city in a new set of walls punctuated by gateways, of which the most important is the Bab Agnaou. The Almohads also constructed the suburban Menara Gardens with their huge central pool and olive groves as a place for recreation and physical training of the Almohad army.

The Marinids showed little interest in Marrakesh but nevertheless commissioned the Bin Yusuf or Yusufiyya Madrasa here. Like Morocco’s other Marinid madrasas, the Yusufiyya has a central courtyard leading to a prayer hall flanked by students’ cells.

The Sa’di dynasty added palaces, shrines and mosques to Marrakesh. The greatest Sa’di sultan, Ahmad al-Mansur al-Dhahabi, embellished the Sa’di tomb complex and renovated the Yusufiyya Madrasa. The Sa’di reproduced Andalusian stucco work in marble from Italy.

Fes, Meknes, Rabat and Marrakesh all became ‘Alawi capitals when this dynasty supplanted the Sa’adi. Many ‘Alawi sultans loved Marrakesh and built palaces and gardens here. Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman (1822-1859) restored the Agdal gardens and his son, Sidi Muhammad sponsored agricultural projects in the area. His grandson’s minister, Mawlay al-Hassan (1873-1894), built the Bahia and Dar Si Sa’id palaces.

Day 13: Sunday 26 April, Marrakesh
•Bahia Palace & courtyard gardens
•Sa’di Tombs
•Bab Agnaou
•Kutubiyya Mosque
•Le Jardin Secret (See Youtube video)
•La Mamounia: historical gardens and afternoon tea

This morning we visit the 19th-century Bahia Palace, a fine example of Andalusian-style architecture. This was previously the home of Grand Vizier Si Moussa in the 1860s and embellished from 1894 to 1900 by slave-turned-vizier Abu ‘Bou’ Ahmed. The name ‘Bahia’ means ‘palace of the beautiful.” There are 160 different rooms in the palace which sprawl out in an open, rambling fashion. Decorations take the form of subtle stucco panels, zellij decorations, tiled floors, smooth arches, carved cedar ceilings, shiny marble (tadlakt) finishes and zouak painted ceilings. It has three beautiful courtyard gardens, rich with intoxicating roses, jacaranda, jasmine, orange blossom and pomegranates.

We also see the Sa’di Tombs. Sultan Ahmed al Mansour constructed the Sa’di Tombs in Marrakech during his rule of Morocco (16th century) as a burial ground for himself and some 200 of his descendants. The most significant chamber in the tombs is the Hall of Twelve Columns. Here rests the Sultan Ahmed el Mansour and his entire family. This chamber has a vaulted roof, Italian marble columns, beautifully decorated cedar doors and carved wooden screens. Inside the inner mausoleum lies Mohammed esh Sheikh, founder of the Sa’di dynasty, as well as the tomb of his mother. The tombs are surrounded by a small garden with richly coloured and scented roses.

We end the morning visiting the 12th-century, horseshoe-arched Bab Agnaou and the Kutubiyya Mosque. The Almohad Bab Agnaou is one of the 19 gates of Marrakesh. The Kutubiyya Mosque, Marrakesh’s largest, is ornament with curved windows, a band of ceramic inlay, pointed merlons, and decorative arches. It was completed under the reign of the Almohad Caliph Yaqub al-Mansur (1184-1199).

Following lunch at the La Maison Arabe’s renowned restaurant ‘Les Trois Saveurs’, we visit Le Jardin Secret, a public garden designed by English landscape architect, Tom Stuart-Smith. The garden is located on the former site of the Riad of the Governor of the medina in the 19th century. Described by Tom Stuart-Smith: “Part of the garden is a faithful reconstruction of an Islamic garden that could have existed in Marrakech in the 19th century. The smaller garden has been largely reconfigured and is a more romantic interpretation of a Moroccan garden, full of the sorts of flowers and colour that would not be found in the more traditional garden. The west courtyard has a citrus grove with underplanting of Stipa tenuissima, California poppy, Lavender and Tulbaghia.”

We end the day with a visit to the gardens of La Mamounia one of the most famous hotels in the world (1929) and beloved of Winston Churchill. Its vast gardens are cared for by 40 gardeners who twice a year plant 60,000 annuals to enhance its grounds. They garden has immaculately mown grass under citrus and olive orchards, a desert garden, a rose garden and a tropical garden as well as many fountains. At the back of the 15-hectare garden there is a herb and kitchen garden whose produce is used in the hotel’s daily meals. We will be served Moroccan style afternoon tea in the garden. (Overnight Marrakesh) BL

Day 14: Monday 27 April, Marrakesh
•Gardens of Jnane Tamsna with Gary Martin and Meryanne Loum-Martin
•Yusufiyya Madrasa
•Jama’ al-Fana’

This morning we transfer to Jnane Tamsna. Owned by ethnobotanist Gary Martin and his wife Meryanne Loum-Martin, this beautifully designed boutique guesthouse boasts a magnificent botany collection. It is set in the Palmeraie area of Marrakesh where tens of thousands of palm trees create shade for other plants to prosper, providing the atmosphere of an oasis. The free-flow approach (there are no formal lawns), adds to the ambience with grounds that encourage aromatic herb gardens, olive groves, lemon trees, vegetable plots and flower beds. The organic gardens are spread over nearly 9 hectares, and are watered constantly by traditional groundwater flow (khettara) and drip irrigation, while the air is naturally scented by gardenia, jasmine and white bougainvillea. We enjoy a visit of the garden and the estate before sitting for lunch.

In the afternoon we visit the religious heart of old Marrakesh where the Almoravid Qubba, the Yusufiyya Madrasa and Yusufiyya Mosque stand, probably on the site of the original Almoravid great mosque of Marrakesh. We shall also walk through the old medina visiting the city’s fascinating souqs. Marrakesh’s souqs are renowned for their vast size and the quality and variety of crafted goods on sale there. As in other Moroccan cities, each different craft can be found in its own particular street or alley: we shall see streets dedicated to gold jewellery, silver, cedar wood carving, silk robes, textiles, leather slippers, copper utensils, ceramics, rugs and carpets. The market area is covered by reed lattices whose dappled shade shelters the alleys from the hot southern sun.

We walk through the old city to its commercial and recreational heart, the Jama’ al-Fana’, an extraordinary public arena lined with booths selling fresh orange and grapefruit juice, nuts and sweets. In the centre a number of stalls offer snacks and meals of infinite variety, and numerous people provide public services and entertainments. Dentists, preachers, acrobats, black musicians from the Gnawa religious brotherhood, letter writers, snake charmers and story tellers all mingle in the Jama’ al-Fana’ from dusk late into the night. This square is very dear to the people of Marrakesh, a place to meet and promenade. This is evening is at leisure. You may wish to stay on in the Jama’ al-Fana’ to enjoy its extraordinary atmosphere. (Overnight Marrakesh) BL

Day 15: Tuesday 28 April, Marrakesh
•Jardin Majorelle and Musée d’Art Berbère
•Villa Oasis: the private garden of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé (to be confirmed in 2020)
•Yves Saint Laurent Museum
•Afternoon at leisure

Marrakesh, perhaps known best for its souqs (markets), squares and spices, also has many lush gardens. Green spaces have always been an integral part of life in Marrakesh. The city’s gardens have also inspired many artists, fashion designers and writers over the years. The British writer Osbert Sitwell said Marrakesh “is the ideal African city of water-lawns, cool, pillared palaces and orange groves.” Matisse, Delacroix, Yves Saint Laurent, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jean-Paul Getty visited too, finding inspiration and spending long periods in the city.

Early this morning we visit the Jardin Majorelle, created by the French painter Jacques Majorelle (1886-1962) and later owned by Yves Saint Laurent. The garden presents a cacophony of pink bougainvillea, blush-coloured water lilies, and a vast array of cacti. The inner walls are painted a vibrant ‘Majorelle’ blue, named after the garden’s founder. Majorelle’s art-deco studio houses a Berber Art Museum which displays valuable ceramics, weapons and magnificent jewellery, textiles, carpets, woodwork and other treasures. We also, by special invitation, will visit the gardens of Villa Oasis, Yves Saint Laurent’s private home adjoining the Jardin Majorelle. The garden was designed by Madison Cox.

Located right next to the Jardin Majorelle is the Yves Saint Laurent Museum dedicated to the work of the French fashion designer. This new museum houses an important selection from the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent’s impressive collection, which comprises 5,000 items of clothing, 15,000 haute couture accessories as well as tens of thousands of sketches and assorted objects. The museum’s landscaped areas are also designed by Madison Cox.

The remain of the day is at leisure. (Overnight Marrakesh) B

Day 16: Wednesday 29 April, Marrakesh – Ourika Valley – Marrakesh
•Private gardens of Dar Azaren, Tnine Ourika
•Anima Garden
•Beldi Country Club, lunch and garden

Today we drive thirty kilometres south of Marrakesh to visit the secluded retreat of Dar Azaren, owned by Liliane Fawcett. This dar (house), set in 6.5 hectares, is nestled within olive groves and walled gardens, and offers spectacular views of the High Atlas Mountains. The grounds and gardens, conceived by Arnaud Maurières and Éric Ossart, blend subtle plantations of fragrant flowers and sculptural cacti with local crops. The colours of the landscape using the grey santolina, mauve lantana and enormous Kalanchoe set a dramatic scene.

We then visit the nearby newly opened Anima, one of the most beautiful and imaginative gardens in Morocco. Austrian multi-media artist André Heller’s opulent, two-hectare botanical garden is a magical place of sensuality and wonder. It combines unusual sculptures with flowers and plants, paying homage to local traditions and fauna, as well as incorporating modern Western elements.

We return to Marrakesh to dine at the Beldi Country Club, set in a breathtaking landscape. After lunch, we visit the gardens, the 15 acres of gardens are filled with palms, olive and fruit trees, pampas grasses and 15,000 rose bushes. It also features 2 reflection pools.

The remainder of the day is at leisure. (Overnight Marrakesh) BL

Taroudant – 5 nights

Day 17: Thursday 30 April, Marrakesh – Ouirgane – Taroudant
•Lunch at Domaine de la Roseraie, Ouirgane
•Dar Al Hossoun

Today we journey south to Taroudant, following one of the most spectacular routes in Morocco. It winds its way up and then down through the High Atlas, above the beautiful valleys and past isolated villages, eventually reaching the Tizi-n-Test pass, with its breathtaking views across the Souss Valley to the Anti Atlas.

We break for lunch in Ouirgane, a small village surrounded by stunning greenery, red-earth hills and pine forests. Lunch will be served in the Domaine de la Roseraie, which is set in the middle of 25 hectares of flower beds, olive trees, orchards and, as the name suggests, plenty of rose bushes. Winding paths through the estate offer unique views over the Toubkal range. (Mt Toubkkal is the highest peak in the Atlas mountains, and in North Africa, at 4137 metres).

We continue south along windy roads to Taroudant, known as the ‘pearl of the Souss Valley’. Here our group will stay at Dar Al Hossoun, designed by Arnaud Maurières and Éric Ossart.

For over 25 years, Maurières and Éric Ossart have been designing gardens in France and throughout the Mediterranean region. When they moved to southern Morocco they realised the importance of designing low-maintenance gardens for a dry climate. Since 2002, they have been working to create gardens in the olive groves to the west of Taroudant. Their work focuses on preserving areas of unspoiled natural wilderness, designing and building gardens and rammed-earth houses that have by stages added an entirely new neighbourhood to the city.

In the company of Ollivier Verra, owner of Dar Al Hossoun, we take a tour of Dar Al Hossoun before dinner.

Dar Al Hossoun was Ossart & Maurières’ very first build, one of the most widely publicised examples of their work as landscape architects. Surrounded by a garden that served originally as a test bed to study plant performance in the arid, pre-Saharan environment of the Souss Valley, the property boasts hundreds of species of plants proved to be drought-tolerant, plus an impressive 500-metre-square sunken garden for fragile species not usually found in this region. (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

Day 18: Friday 1 May, Taroudant
•Dar Igdad and L’Orange Bleue
•Dar Deboules
•Dar Carlhian
•Tour of Taroudant’s secret gardens by horse & carriage
•Dar Zahia
•Palais Salam
•Dar Ali
•Dar Sidi Hussein
•Dinner at Dar Sidi ou Sidi, the private home of Arnaud Maurières and Eric Ossart

Today we continue our discovery of Ossart & Maurières’ finest gardens in the Hossoun olive grove.

The Dar Al Hossoun build prompted the construction of the two adjoining properties, Dar Igdad and L’Orange Bleue, which marked Ossart & Maurières’ very first venture into steppe planning: with groups of grasses, drought-tolerant shrubs (grown mainly from seeds collected in Madagascar and Mexico) and succulents featuring a rich collection of opuntia (prickly pear).

Dar Igdad, meaning ‘the house of the birds’ in Berber, was begun in 2007 on the site of a former olive grove. Like Dar Al Hossoun, it is surrounded by high earthen walls in a rich mahogany colour, against which still stand many of the grove’s original multi-trunked trees. The garden, which featured in Garden Illustrated by Louisa Jones, is drought tolerant. The most spectacular part, a vast meadow, appears natural but is actually composed of species from similar biotopes from all over the world, like American agaves and African euphorbias that grow among the meadow’s Sahara grasses.

At Dar Deboules and Dar Carlhian, we see Ossart & Maurières’ most recent designs. Both gardens offer an unusually broad range of steppe plants, making it possible to track growth from planting to maturity. In the Dar Deboules, a range of new plants are used. Dar Carlhian is the very last house and garden designed by Ossart & Maurières in Morocco. This lighter and more economical garden display wild plants imported from the Mexican pampa.

Following a buffet lunch in the sunken garden of Dar Al Hossoun, we take a tour of Taroudant’s secret gardens by horse and carriage.

Taroudant, a walled Berber market town, lies just south of the High Atlas and to the north of the Anti Atlas. It gained commercial and political importance thanks to its position at the heart of the fertile Souss Valley. The Sa’adi made it their capital for a short time in the 16th century before moving on to Marrakesh. The 7.5 kilometres of ramparts surrounding Taroudant are among the best-preserved pise (reinforced mud) walls in Morocco. As the sun moves across the sky their colour changes from golden brown to the deepest red.

Built in the 16th and 17th century, a string of mighty defensive towers create the gates of the city. One of the most commonly used of these gates is the impressive, triple-arched Bab el-Kasbah, approached along an avenue of orange trees. Beyond and to the right past an olive press stands another gate, Bab Sedra that leads to the old qasba quarter – a fortress built by Moulay Ismail in the 17th century that is now the poorest part of town.

At the heart of this ancient city lies the medina, home to traditional Moroccan houses with interior gardens or courtyards, many of them built or restored by Ossart and Maurières. These are the riads for which Morocco is famous – havens of freshness usually exclusively reserved for their owners, and now ours to discover on this enchanting tour.

We visit first Dar Zahia’s lush courtyards. Then enjoy some tea at Palais Salam, the former Pasha’s residence, before visiting Dar Ali, Empress Farah’s house. Then we visit Sidi Hussein, the house of five courtyards. This is one of Ossart and Maurières’ most ambitious projects in the medina. It is composed of several buildings, each one arranged around an amazing inner garden but all built in different styles to reflect the changing face of Taroudant architecture. The site was formerly occupied by badly dilapidated houses that were demolished to free up some 1000 square metres of building space.

Dinner will be served in the Dar Sidi ou Sidi, the private home of Arnaud Maurières and Eric Ossart, tucked away deep in the souq, at the heart of the old town. The house, a fine example of Taroudant vernacular architecture, features a terrace-planted botanic garden housing Ossart and Maurières’ private plant collection.

Dinner is followed by a screening (with commentary) of Frédéric Wilner’s film Jardins d’Eden (Gardens of Eden). (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

Day 19: Saturday 2 May, Taroudant – Tiout Oasis – Taroudant
•Tiout Oasis and the Anti Atlas
•Dar El Nour
•Dar El Ahbab

In the company of Ollivier Verra, we subdivide into two groups to take two small coaches on a scenic drive through the Souss Valley to the fertile oasis of Tiout, located on the northern edge of the Anti Atlas mountains.

In the Souss Valley we’ll witness the tremendous contrast between commercially farmed irrigated cash crops (such as oranges, maize or bananas) and subsistence farming of arid land including the strange sight of goats grazing in the native argania (trees). Argania spinosa, endemic to the semi-desert Sous Valley and the Algerian region of Tindouf, is a source of argan oil used for dipping bread, on couscous, salads, and in natural cosmetics. In Morocco, arganeraie forests now cover some 8280 square kilometres, designated as a UNESCO biosphere reserve.

The Tiout Oasis, formed by a now dried-up ancient lake, is probably the westernmost of all the oases that have survived from antiquity. It provides a perfect demonstration of the traditional custom of sharing irrigation water and also reflects the diverse richness of sub-Saharan arable farming. Our excursion includes a guided tour led by a local farmer, a visit to women argan oil cooperative, with lunch under Berber canvas at the heart of the oasis.

We return to the Hossoun valley to visit Dar El Nour and Dar Ahbab. These two houses and gardens were specifically designed for a relatively small plot of land, focusing on the affinity between rammed-earth buildings and natural swimming pools. The gardens appear wild, but do in fact contain at least 200 different species of carefully selected plants.

Tonight we dine together at Dar Ahbab. We return to Dar Al Hossoun for a screening of Jacques Becker’s Ali Baba et les 40 voleurs (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) – a 1954 film shot in Taroudant, starring French actor and singer Fernandel. (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

Day 20: Sunday 3 May, Taroudant
•Dar Crouzet
•Visit to the souq and ramparts
•La Tour des Faucons, lunch and garden
•Les Jardins de Andrew
•Palais Oumensour, dinner

This morning we visit two gardens located in the outskirt of Taroudant. We start with a visit to Dar Crouzet, in the Hossoun neighbourhood. Here, oval and round buildings are surrounded by tall plants and trees.

We transfer to the medina. Today, Taroudant is an important hub in southern Morocco well known for its handicrafts, jewellery design, Berber crafts and woodwork. Within the walled inner city there are two main squares – Place Assarag (Place Alaouyine) and Place Talmoklate (Place en Nasr) – which mark the centre of town, with the main souq area between them. The pedestrian area of Place Assarag is the centre of activity, and comes alive in late afternoon as the sun’s heat eases off and people come out to promenade. Lately it has seen the return of performers such as storytellers, snake charmers and musicians – as in Marrakesh’s Jemaa el-Fnaa, but on a smaller scale.

Then we head for La Tour des Faucons (The Falcon’s Villa). Welcomed by Karl Morsher, the owner and designer, we visit his contemporary style villa and tower, as well as the renovated farmhouse and its extensive grounds of palm and olive trees (producing their own organic olive oil) and exotic flower-filled gardens. We enjoy our lunch at La Tour des Faucons.

In the afternoon we visit Les Jardins de Andrew. Andrew is an eccentric British collector with a taste for whimsical constructions. Andrew’s garden, located outside the ramparts, is punctuated by fanciful creations that lend an air of mystery to their lush surroundings. Ossart and Maurières describe their work thus: “using the same plants as at Dar Igdad, we laid out here a very formal garden corresponding exactly to the architecture of the house. Keeping in mind the advice of the great Brazilian designer Roberto Burle Marx, we used the right plant in the right place, whether rare or commonplace, native or exotic. We often use bold swaths of the same plant to get different moods even in this relatively small garden”.

Close to the souq, we enjoy our dinner in the beautiful Palais Oumensour and its lush patio.

We return to our riad, Dar Al Hossoun, for a screening of the film La Route des cédrats (‘The Citron Trail’) directed by Izza Genini (with commentary). (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

Day 21: Monday 4 May, Taroudant – Afensou and the upper valley of the Oued Ouaer – Taroudant
•Claudio Bravo palace and gardens
•Lunch in traditional Berber house
•Trek across high plateaux to study flora found at medium altitude around Imoulass
•High-altitude garden designed by Éric Ossart and Arnaud Maurières, Afra
•Farewell Dinner at Dar Al Hossoun

Today, we spend the morning visiting the Claudio Bravo palace and gardens. Chilean painter Claudio Bravo spent his last years building an enormous palace in Taroudant in which to house his collections. The gardens surrounding the palace are equally enormous and are arranged around a large pond that provides water for citrus and banana trees; the interior gardens were designed by Ossart and Maurières.

Taroudant stands at the foot of the Western High Atlas Mountains, which reach a maximum elevation at Djebel Aoulim of 3400 metres. In the upper valleys are ancient mud brick and pisé villages nestling in high-altitude oases – traditional settlements planted with palm trees, olive groves and even walnut trees in the highest villages. The tracts of land in between them provide an ideal habitat for a wealth of native flora.

Following lunch in a traditional Berber house, we trek across the high plateau (nothing too demanding) through thickets of thuja (a tree of the coniferous family, close to cedar, which grows only in Morocco, specifically in the Atlas Mountains, used by artisans for making tables, boxes etc) and the flora found at medium altitude around Imoulass (Callitris articulate, Polygala balansae, Thymus saturejoïdes, Salvia taraxifolia, Chamacytisus albidus, etc).

In the village of Afra we visit Ossart & Maurières’ high-altitude garden – the perfect location for hundreds of different plant species, including some rare specimens.

We return to our riad for a farewell meal at Dar Al Hossoun. (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

Day 22: Tuesday 5 May, Taroudant – Agadir, Tour Ends.
•Airport transfer for those taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight

This morning we shall transfer to Agadir airport in order to board our domestic flight to Casablanca. Group members taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer to the airport for the flight home. Those not taking this flight can use a taxi or contact ASA to arrange a private transfer. B

NOTE: The detailed itinerary provides an outline of the proposed daily program. Participants should note that the daily activities described in this itinerary may be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate changes in opening hours, road conditions, flight schedules etc. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents. Meals included in the tour price are indicated in the detailed itinerary where: B= breakfast, L= light lunch or picnic lunch and D= evening meal.

Belgium and the Rhine Valley: Tradition and Innovation in Art & Garden Design

Tour Highlights

•Led by Sandra McMahon and Diane Perelsztejn, this tour is a feast of splendid classic and contemporary private gardens, great museums and natural landscapes of Belgium, Southern Netherlands and the Rhine Valley.
•View the work of leading Flemish designers and horticulturalists including Daniël Ost, Erik Dhont, and Piet Blanckaert.
•By special invitation explore the private gardens of Jacques Wirtz featured in Monty Don’s Around the World in 80 Gardens and Marc Moris.
•By special invitation visit Domain Hemelrijk, the former home of Robert and Jelena de Belder who designed their private garden with their close friend, Russell Page.
•Meet landscape architect Chris Ghyselen, known for his use of fine grasses and perennials, who will show us his own private garden.
•Explore classic Dutch country gardens, and designs by Mien Ruys at the 14th-century Kasteel van Oostkerke which features flower-filled gardens, moats and polder meadows.
•Learn about the New German Style: at Hermannshof where Cassian Schmidt has developed one of the finest and most exciting modern gardens in Europe; and at HORTVS the garden of Peter Janke, a rising star in German landscape design.
•View the abundant rose collections in the traditional ‘kasteel’ gardens of Hex, and Coloma, the latter containing over 3000 varieties.
•View the great Gothic churches, town halls and merchant palaces of Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp.
•In Antwerp, Brussels and Bruges visit world-class collections of paintings, sculptures and drawings; we view works by Peter Paul Rubens, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Frans Hals, Peter Bruegel, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Anthony van Dyck and René Magritte.
•Explore the Art Deco home of David and Alice van Buuren; the private house and studio of Art Nouveau Architect, Victor Horta; and the house and studio of Rubens with a garden inspired by his painting The Walk in the Garden.
•Spend two nights in the charming medieval town of Durbuy; walk through the Forest of the Ardennes, and view ancient dolmens and menhirs in the neighbouring village of Wéris.
•Take a cruise from Boppard to Rüdesheim am Rhein; this UNESCO World Heritage listed stretch of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley is dotted with castles, historic towns and vineyards.
•Enjoy fine food, dining at the 2-star Michelin restaurant Le Chalet de la Forêt, in Brussels, after taking the aperitif in its vegetable garden where Erik Dhont combines landscaping with art and the use of abstract forms.

21-day Cultural Garden Tour of Belgium and the Rhine Valley

Overnight Antwerp (5 nights) • Bruges (3 nights) • Ghent (2 nights) • Brussels (3 nights) • Durbuy (2 nights) • Maastricht (1 night) • Boppard (2 nights) • Rüdesheim am Rhein (2 nights)

Overview

This tour, led by Sandra McMahon, director of Melbourne’s important studio, Gardenscape Design, and multi award-winning Belgian documentary filmmaker Diane Perelsztejn, explores the contemporary renaissance of garden design in Belgium, the Southern Netherlands, and the Rhine Valley. We visit a diversity of private gardens by leading Flemish designers such Jacques Wirtz, Daniël Ost, Erik Dhont, Piet Blanckaert, Marc Moris and Dutch master Mien Ruys, and spend time with landscape architect, Chris Ghyselen, in his private garden noted for its use of fine grasses and perennials. We visit Domain Hemelrijk, the former home of Robert and Jelena de Belder who designed their private garden with their close friend, Russell Page. We learn about the New German Style: at Hermannshof where Cassian Schmidt has developed one of the finest and most exciting modern gardens in Europe; and at HORTVS the garden of Peter Janke, a rising star in German landscape design. The Northern Renaissance flowered in the great paintings of Flemish and German artists like Jan van Eyck and Joachim Patinir, who set their figures in wondrous landscapes, paralleling the region’s leadership in Renaissance and Baroque gardening. We explore the emergence of Northern Art in Antwerp’s and Bruges’ fine collections and in masterpieces like Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. We also encounter Peter Paul Rubens’ own studio and garden, and the emergence of Art Nouveau and Surrealism in architectural masterpieces of Victor Horta and René Magritte’s extraordinary paintings. The tour visits grand castles and country houses, wonderful historic towns like Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges, beautiful medieval villages like Durbuy and fairytale castles perched on mountain tops along the Rhine Valley. We enjoy fine food, dining at the 2-star Michelin restaurant Le Chalet de la Forêt, in Brussels, after taking the aperitif in its vegetable garden where Erik Dhont combines landscaping with art and the use of abstract forms. We explore the lovely forest of the Ardennes and end our tour with a cruise down one of the Rhine’s most beautiful stretches, recognised in UNESCO’s World Heritage listing.

Antwerp – 5 nights

Day 1: Wednesday 3 June, Brussels – Antwerp
•Arrival Transfer for participants arriving on the ASA ‘designated’ flight
•Short Orientation

Our tour commences in Antwerp. Participants taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight are scheduled to arrive into Brussels in the mid-afternoon. Upon arrival we transfer by private coach to the Hotel ‘t Sandt in Antwerp. If you are travelling independently, please make your own way to the hotel or contact ASA for assistance with a private transfer.

Time permitting, we will take a short orientation walk around the hotel precinct. (Overnight Antwerp)

Day 2: Thursday 4 June, Antwerp – Berlaar-Gestel – Lier – Antwerp
•‘Morishof’: private garden of Marc Moris, Berlaar-Gestel
•‘t-Kranske’: City garden renovated by Marc Moris, Lier
•Private garden design by Erik Dhont, Lier (to be confirmed)
•Welcome Dinner at the Sir Anthony Van Dijck Restaurant

“Flanders was once the leading horticultural nation of Europe. In the sixteenth century the Antwerp humanists turned Flanders into a centre of botany. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dozens of fruit varieties were created and the rarest plants grown and improved. But … war and foreign occupation put an end to this thriving garden culture. In recent years we have witnessed a remarkable revival of gardening and beautiful new gardens are now once more [being] created”.

Today we are introduced to the work of two of Belgium’s leading landscape designers, Marc Moris and Erik Dhont. Marc Moris founded Groep Moris in 1986. Considered a master of simplicity, he has acquired a reputation for designing gardens which have an air of maturity. Part of the secret to his success has been his 25ha nursery where he grows solitary trees and large shrubs which are up to 100 years old, and which are allowed to develop as naturally as possible. This makes his plants particularly suitable for the ‘timeless’ gardens which he creates. This morning we visit ‘Morishof’, Marc Moris’ private domain, located in the small picturesque village of Gestel. His 3ha garden includes a vegetable garden, a meadow, natural swimming pool and a flower garden; Gestel itself is surrounded by four castles.

In the nearby town of Lier we visit ‘t-Kranske, a monastic complex restored by Marc Moris. Originally an 18th-century convent, it later became a school which built additional classrooms over the courtyard. As part of his renovation, Marc Moris cleared the courtyard and developed a 6000m2 city garden. Key elements of the original convent including the main chapel were also restored. We shall tour the gardens and visit the flower shop of resident artist Raf Verwimp.

Erik Dhont is an internationally renowned landscape architect. Based in Brussels, his portfolio includes a huge range of projects: private and public gardens, urban developments, farms and restoration work. One of his projects in Lier involved the restoration of an early 19th-century park. Today this private garden, which we hope to visit, includes an extensive collection of shrubs and flowering trees, ancient garden follies and a spectacular walk of cut flowers among flowing box hedges.

Tonight we enjoy a welcome dinner at the Sir Anthony Van Dijck Restaurant located in the medieval quarter of Antwerp. (Overnight Antwerp) BD

Day 3: Friday 5 June, Antwerp – Schoten – Essen – Antwerp
•Private garden of Jacques Wirtz, Schoten – featured in Monty Don’s Around the World in 80 Gardens
•Private garden designed by Jacques Wirtz
•Domain De Hemelrijk, Essen
•Museum aan de Stroom (exterior only) and Antwerp’s historic port

This morning we visit the private garden of the late Jacques Wirtz, the world-renowned Belgian landscape architect who, in his innovative gardens, enhanced his sculptural treatment of boxwood and yew hedges by drawing on his deep knowledge of plants and flowers. Wirtz, whose career began when he opened a flower nursery in 1946, would ultimately be compared to André Le Nôtre, the French landscape architect who designed the magnificent gardens of Versailles. His son, Martin, who is now CEO of Wirtz International, has kindly agreed to show us the family’s private garden. Nearby we also visit another private garden designed by his father.

From Schoten we travel north to the small town of Essen located just south of the Netherlands border. After lunch at Restaurant Kiekenhoeve we visit the private arboretum and gardens of De Hemelrijk, home to the De Belder family since 1961. These private gardens were designed by Jelena and Robert De Belder together with their close friend, the internationally renowned garden designer Russell Page, who regularly stayed here. Page’s close association with the De Belders explains the uniqueness of this garden in his oeuvre, for it was not designed as a formal project but rather evolved informally during his sojourns there; often a section to be developed on a particular day would be sketched out roughly at breakfast. The result has been described as ‘a natural looking, idealistic, Arcadian landscape’.

During our return drive to Antwerp we make a short diversion to view the impressive exterior of Museum aan de Stroom (MAS). This extraordinary ultramodern tower, composed of great blocks separated by undulating glass walls, was designed by the acclaimed Rotterdam firm Neutelings-Riedijk Architecten. Across from the MAS is Antwerp’s Port Authority which includes the new Port House designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, and the Red Star Line Museum designed by New York architects Beyer Blinder Belle. A short visit to the rooftop of the MAS provides panoramic views of the city and its historic port. (Overnight Antwerp) BL

Day 4: Saturday 6 June, Antwerp
•Rubens’ House
•Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedral (Cathedral of Our Lady)
•The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) (subject to reopening in 2020)

This morning we visit the house and studio that the great 17th-century artist, Peter Paul Rubens, built for himself. Rubens was not only a famous painter but also a great humanist and diplomat. Having garnered great wealth, he was able to build this palatial house, living here and working in his adjacent studio. He entertained Europe’s royalty and aristocracy in the house, displaying his impressive art collection in a beautiful art room. We visit the house, the workshop and Rubens’ charming garden inspired by his painting The Walk in the Garden (c. 1631).

We also visit the Cathedral of Our Lady. Four of Rubens’ most important paintings, including the Raising of the Cross and his Descent from the Cross, embellish this vast seven-nave Gothic cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In the afternoon we visit KMSKA, a world-class museum due to open in 2020 after extensive renovations. The collection of paintings, sculptures and drawings, dating from the 14th to the 20th centuries, includes work by Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Frans Hals, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and his pupil Anthony van Dyck. (Overnight Antwerp) B

Day 5: Sunday 7 June, Antwerp – Hoeven – Schijf – Vrasene – Antwerp
•Tielens and Tielens, Hoeven
•De Jorissenhoeve, Schijf
•De Wiedenhof, Vrasene

This morning we drive across the border to visit two private Dutch gardens. We first visit the garden of Albert Tielens in Hoeven. Albert is a passionate gardener; his work is characterised by straight lines and circles which are perfectly balanced by sumptuous plantings. Within the garden lies a fifty-metre long swimming pond lined with mixed borders. Avenues of pear, lime and maple trees divide the peaceful lawns, and to the rear of the garden is a vliedberg – an artificial hill surrounded by a canal. Such man-made hills were climbed in order to escape rising flood waters.

In the neighbouring village of Schijf we visit De Jorissenhoeve, an historic 19th-century farmhouse owned by garden designer Ineke Lambregts. This garden ‘flows’ between verdant ‘rooms’: stunning flower court with scented roses, herb garden, heritage vegetable garden, water features, woodland garden, and the pasture where very contented Lakenvelder cows graze.

From Schijf we return to East Flanders to visit De Wiedenhof, the private garden of Leo and Suzanne Laureyns-Wynter. This long, relatively narrow garden (150 x 25m), a brilliant innovation in design, has been laid out by the owners in a most unconventional way. The length of the garden is emphasised by two 90m-long grass strips with superbly maintained pleached hornbeam hedges forming a powerful framework for sumptuous seasonal plantings. In summer we will see roses, iris and many other perennials. (Overnight Antwerp) BL

Bruges – 3 nights

Day 6: Monday 8 June, Antwerp – Oosteekloo – Damme – Sijsele – Bruges
•Bijsterveld, Oosteekloo
•Medieval village of Damme
•Kasteel van Oostkerke, Damme
•Private garden of Katrien Vandierendonck, Sijsele

Today we travel to West Flanders, visiting three very different private gardens. Outside the historic village of Oosteekloo lies Bijsterveld, an old walled farm that once belonged to a 14th-century Cistercian Abbey. Its wall, lined with majestic pollarded willows, encloses a 2.5-acre romantic garden originally created by artist Nina Balthau in 1988. A series of hedged enclosures leads to arches which groan under roses, and to meadows that erupt in sheets of wildflowers. A walking path gives access to the lovely old canals which surround the farm. Birgit Rouseré purchased the garden in 2013 and has continued to develop it with the assistance of landscape architect Steven De Bruycker.

From Oosteekloo we journey to the picturesque medieval village of Damme which lies 6kms northeast of Bruges. Before the Zwijn inlet silted, this village served as the customs point and outer port of Bruges and thus enjoyed great importance and prosperity. There will be time at leisure for lunch and to explore the village, which features a magnificent Gothic Town Hall, the impressive Church of Our Lady, and the canals that are lined with magnificent wind-twisted poplars.

Oostkerke Castle in Damme had lain in ruins for hundreds of years before Allison Campbell-Roebling and her husband Baron Joseph Van Der Elst, with the help of the great Dutch landscape architect Mien Ruys, restored it to its former glory. Mien Ruys was a specialist in hardy plants; she also had a special feeling for the use of axes and perspectives. The result is an idyllic combination of intimate spaces and grandiose avenues. Separate gardens, including a private courtyard, a Maria garden and a rose garden, combine harmoniously with surrounding polder meadows. Footpaths have been laid out on the foundations of the old ramparts, and the ancient moats have been excavated to form an important section of the current garden. The gardens, which have undergone further restoration under the direction of André Van Wassenhove and Maurice Vergote, are considered to be one of the most beautiful gardens of West Flanders.

Our final visit today is to the private garden of Katrien Vandierendonck, an internationally celebrated floral designer. We visit this gentle and welcoming artist in her own idyllic 7500 m2 garden. Here numerous garden ‘rooms’, a huge Wisteria arch, pond and flower borders, harmonize perfectly with the surrounding landscape. At the end of the visit we will be treated to afternoon tea with delicious home-baked waffles.

From the village of Sijsele we continue to Bruges, the capital of West Flanders. One of a few canal-based northern cities, it is often referred to as ‘The Venice of the North’. The historical centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site. (Overnight Bruges) B

Day 7: Tuesday 9 June, Bruges
•Private gardens designed by landscape architect Piet Blanckaert
•Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Church of our Lady)
•Saint John’s Hospital & the Hans Memling Museum
•Canal Cruise of Bruges

We spend the morning visiting private gardens designed by internationally acclaimed landscape architect Piet Blanckaert, who is based in Bruges. His recent projects include the Flanders Fields Memorial Garden, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War, which is located at Wellington Barracks adjacent to Buckingham Palace, London.

This afternoon we take a walking tour of Bruges. We begin with a visit to the Church of Our Lady, the interior of which is a treasure house of art. In the choir behind the high altar are the tombs of Charles the Bold, last Valois Duke of Burgundy, and his daughter, Mary. Their gilt bronze full-length effigies lie on polished slabs of black stone. The most celebrated treasure of the church is, however, Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna (1504), a marble sculpture of the Virgin and Child probably originally sculpted for Siena Cathedral.

We next visit the St John’s Hospital Complex, which also includes the small Hans Memling Museum. Hans Memling (1430-1494), who was born in Germany, worked in Bruges from 1465, and was closely associated with the Knights Hospitaller. One of this museum’s greatest treasures is his late masterpiece, The Shrine of St Ursula, a carved and gilded wooden reliquary containing panel inserts painted by the master.

Until around 1600, Bruges was an important Hanseatic League port city linked to the sea by the Zwijn canal. Other canals were dug to facilitate the passage of goods to this canal and thence to its commercial outpost, the aforementioned harbour at Damme. We conclude the afternoon with a short canal cruise. This evening we dine together at a local restaurant. (Overnight Bruges) BD

Day 8: Wednesday 10 June, Bruges – Oedelem – Beernem – Bruges
•Private garden of André Van Wassenhove, Assebroek
•Private garden of landscape designer, Chris Ghyselen, Oedelem
•‘Boereweg’ in Beernem: Chris Ghyselen’s first garden design
•A new cottage garden, designed by Chris Ghyselen

This morning we visit a private city garden designed by the late André Van Wassenhove, a well-known landscape architect who was based in Bruges. We then travel to the rural municipality of Beernem where we will be joined by Chris Ghyselen who will show us his own private garden. Chris Ghyselen’s parents’ garden was designed by Van Wassenhove, whose use of perennials inspired the young man. After training as a landscape architect, Chris worked with Van Wassenhove for six months before forming his own landscape company in 1984. Known for his use of fine grasses and perennials, Ghyselen enjoys the combination of strong structure, often using hedges, with informal planting. Chris’s 4500m² garden is located on a cliff that extends from Oedelem to Ursel. The presence of clay in combination with compost and sand allows plants to grow very well here. The garden, created in two phases, features playful hedges, water features, and a double border of high and small perennials. There is also a swimming pond and a flower meadow. The use of many grasses provides a perfect transition to the surrounding landscape.

In the afternoon we visit two other gardens by Chris Ghyselen: a new cottage garden, and ‘Boereweg’, Chris’s first design project created over 30 years ago. Owned by Rita and green journalist, Marc Verachtert, an original farmyard and garden were developed into a spacious garden of 8000m². By using low hedges, Chris was able to preserve open character of the farm garden. The house has two terraces: one with a pond, the other with a view of a perennial ‘room’. Various other garden ‘rooms’ contain an orchard, a nut garden with vegetables and cut flowers, and an animal meadow with pollarded willows. (Overnight Bruges) BL

Ghent – 2 nights

Day 9: Thursday 11 June, Bruges – Deinze – Ghent
•Ooidonk Castle
•Cathedral of St Bavo, Ghent

Today we depart Bruges and travel to Ghent, the capital of East Flanders. Our journey takes us Ooidonk Castle, near the city of Ghent. The moated castle stands stately, strong and sumptuous, set on a bend of the river Leie. We take a private visit to this medieval fortress, rebuilt in 1595, widely considered as one of Belgium’s finest castles and often called the ‘Chambord of Flanders’. It is a unique example of the Hispanic-Flemish architectural style that emerged during the Renaissance, and is still the living home to Count and Countess Henry t’Kint de Roodenbeke and their three young sons. The salons are filled with original paintings, engravings and antiques including 17th-century cabinets, 18th-century Beauvais tapestries and Delft porcelain.

The castle is surrounded by nearly four acres of magical landscaped gardens in the French style. In the summer, roses adorn the garden beds, supplemented by orange trees. Red beech avenue and age-old oaks are planted together in groups of five. A bridge leads to a formal English park, laid out around a 19th-century pavilion.

This afternoon we visit the monumental masterpiece of Flemish art, the huge 24-panel altarpiece, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, in Ghent’s Cathedral of St Bavo. This great work was begun by Hubert van Eyck (c.1390-1426) and completed after his death by Jan van Eyck in 1432. Commissioned for the chapel in which it still stands by a wealthy alderman in 1420, the painting is arguably the greatest work of the Northern Renaissance. It is a triumph of the use of thin oil glazes to bathe scenes in a rich luminous atmosphere and of the naturalism that represented a giant step forward from the rigid style of Gothic religious art. Its vast intricacy is spellbinding. St Bavo’s other treasures include Rubens’s recently restored Conversion of St Bavo (1623) and the magnificent funerary monument of Bishop Anton Triest by François and Hieronymus II du Quesnoy. The Romanesque crypt holds a wealth of religious antiquities, vestments, sculptures, and paintings. (Overnight Ghent) B

Day 10: Friday 12 June, Ghent – Temse – Ghent
•Full day visiting gardens designed by Daniël Ost (to be confirmed)
•De Uil (The Owl), Temse

Daniël Ost began his working life as a florist; he is now celebrated throughout Europe and Japan as the world’s leading floral artist. His company, Gardens Daniel Ost, however, is about much more than floral art: his design team is highly sought after for projects, from roof terraces in Tokyo to public and private gardens all over Europe. Daniël will accompany us (or if unavailable his General Manager) for a full day in Ghent, as we visit four of his gardens, including the garden of Huis De Uil in the Fonteinstraat, the former residence of artist Karel Aubroeck (1894-1986), now the home of interior designer Marc Massa and Roger Liekens. This garden is noted for its beautiful wild shadow garden and a particularly stylized south garden. (Overnight Ghent) B

Brussels – 3 nights

Day 11: Saturday 13 June, Ghent – Gaasbeek – Sint-Pieters-Leeuw – Brussels
•Baljuwshuis, Gaasbeek: Private garden designed by Erik Dhont (to be confirmed)
•Rose Garden of Kasteel Coloma, Sint-Pieters-Leeuw
•Brussels: Orientation Walk

Erik Dhont is internationally renowned for his free and sensitive interpretations of historic garden design. Based in Brussels, he has created a number of spectacular private gardens throughout Belgium and Europe. He has also undertaken numerous large-scale projects including the gardens designed for the Musée Picasso in Paris (2014) and the 55-acre park for fashion designer Dries Van Noten. Outside Brussels, in the town of Gaasbeek, he designed a contemporary maze of hedges and trees to embellish a 17th-century manor house, which we hope to visit.

This afternoon we visit the internationally renowned rose gardens of Kasteel Coloma which contain approximately 3000 varieties of roses and 30,000 rose bushes. Originally built as a fortress in the 16th century, the estate was later transformed into a lusthuis (Flemish country residence). Its gardens are divided into several areas. The first incorporates a traditional geometric structure with varieties of red and white roses planted in designs representing the herarldry of Sint-Pieters-Leeuw. The second garden, which offers fine views over Coloma, displays roses cultivated by Flemish horticulturalists. The third rose garden traces the evolution of the rose from the 18th century to the present with roses from all over the world. There is also a Japanese rose garden, an area devoted to 400 long-stemmed rose bushes, and a rose orchard with more than 125 varieties of rambling and climbing roses.

We spend three nights based in a charming boutique hotel in the historic centre of Brussels. On arrival there will be an optional short orientation walk to Brussels’ Grand Place. (Overnight Brussels) B

Day 12: Sunday 14 June, Brussels
•Musée Victor Horta
•The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium: Musée Magritte
•Time at leisure

Brussels was the cradle of Art Nouveau, which spread across the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. John Julius Norwich has described its Belgian inventor and most famous exponent, Victor Horta, as ‘undoubtedly the key European Art Nouveau architect’. Horta, for example, inspired Hector Guimard, France’s most important exponent of Art Nouveau, who applied Horta’s whiplash design in his work for the Paris Métro.

We first visit the Musée Victor Horta, located in Horta’s private house and studio. Built between 1898 and 1901, the two buildings making up the museum exemplify Art Nouveau at its height. Their utterly exquisite, finely detailed interior decoration has largely been retained, with the mosaics, stained glass, and wall decorations forming a harmonious and elegant whole.

After a coffee break we move to the museum dedicated to Brussels’ most famous modern artist, the Surrealist painter René Magritte. The Musée René Magritte, displaying some 200 original paintings, drawing and sculptures mostly donated by the artist’s wife Georgette and by his principal collector, Irene Hamoir Scutenaire, is the world’s largest collection of his work. We explore all phases of Magritte’s oeuvre, especially that in which incongruous, fantastic subject matter is presented in a style of crisp realism.

The remainder of the day is at leisure. You may wish to continue exploring the wonderful world of Brussels’ Royal art collections. The old masters’ section reflects the vibrant artistic traditions of south Flanders. Artists represented include Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus, Dirk Bouts, Hans Memling, Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach, Gerard David and Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whose Fall of the Rebel Angels and The Census at Bethlehem are collection highlights. Other later masters include Flemish Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Jacques Jordaens, and works from the Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish schools, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vouet, Claude, Ribera and Tiepolo. (Overnight Brussels) B

Day 13: Monday 15 June, Brussels
•Arboretum Kreftenbroek Foundation
•Chalet de la Forêt: Lunch & vegetable garden designed by Erik Dhont
•Musée David et Alice van Buuren: House and garden

We begin this morning with a visit to the Arboretum Kreftenbroek. In the fall of 1980 Etienne and Rose-Marie Van Campenhout purchased a dilapidated farm in Rhode St Genèse on the outskirts of Brussels. The following spring they began the huge task of renovating the farm and transforming its waist-high wild growth into a garden. They later purchased adjacent land that has enabled the creation of a magnificent series of gardens. This sublime series of green spaces begins in front of the house in what is known as the natural garden, the main focal point of which is a small pond. Behind the house is a more classically designed garden with a canopied alley of apple trees linking two large Louis XVI urns. From here open areas, intimate green ‘rooms’, an alternating serpentine pond and an elegant staircase lead to the final goal; the valley garden designed by Jacques Wirtz. This most recent garden links the slopes of the valley, with focal points of hedges, trees, water and sculpture.

At midday we dine at the 2-star Michelin restaurant, Chalet de la Forêt. We take the aperitif in the structured vegetable garden designed for Chef Pascal Devalkeneer by Erik Dhont. This is a magnificent garden of diverse flavours and mixed styles. The English-style flowerbeds of herbaceous plants are organised by colour and are divided into plots in the style of French gardens. Surrounding plots of vegetable gardens specimens of local rustic varieties such as plum trees, mirabelle plum trees and apple trees together recreate a natural Belgian habitat.

We end our day with a visit to the extraordinary house bought in 1928 by the banker and art patron David van Buuren. While its exterior is typical of the so-called Amsterdam School, its interior decoration presents a feast of Art Deco by Belgian, French and Dutch designers. Van Buuren and his wife Alice Piette collected rare furniture, carpets, stained-glass windows, sculptures and masterpieces of painting from the 15th to the 19th century. Along with a historical collection including two Brueghels there are works by Fantin-Latour, Ensor, van Gogh, Signac, Van Dongen and Max Ernst. Van Buuren was also the only patron of van de Woestyne, the precursor of surrealism; the house possesses 32 of his paintings. The gardens, which cover 1.5 hectares, were initially designed by Jules Buyssens, one of the main theorists of the distinctive Belgian Picturesque Garden movement. Between 1927 and 1928 Buyssens created a geometrical ‘Picturesque Garden’ to reflect the Art Deco style of the house. “Its main characteristics were, by the creation of different levels and viewpoints, to give in a confined space an evocation of a variety of natural forms: a wild garden, water and bog gardens, a rock garden, a walled garden, a fernery and herbaceous border. His ingenuity in the use of water is illustrated by a stream which trickles around the site.” In 1969 the Brussels designer, René Pechère, enlarged the gardens with the addition of the ‘Garden of the Heart’ and the ‘Labyrinth’. (Overnight Brussels) BL

Durbuy – 2 nights

Day 14: Tuesday 16 June, Brussels – Wépion – Dinant – Durbuy
•Le Sous-Bois, Wépion
•Gardens of Annevoie
•The provincial town of Dinant

We spend the day in the Meuse Valley visiting a private garden, the garden of a beautiful château and the lovely provincial town of Dinant.

Outside Wépion we visit Le Sous-Bois, a private garden designed by owners Philippe Taminiaux and Karine Fonsny. This 35-acre garden, which includes an English garden and over 100 varieties of climbing roses, affords sweeping views of the Meuse Valley. From the entrance gate a path leads through a pine forest, in which views repeatedly open up. Biodiversity reigns supreme in this garden: from the expanses of shade-loving plantings to long, lushly planted borders that lead the visitor deep into the garden. Mixed borders incorporate not only perennials, but shrub roses and a huge variety of other shrubs grown for their foliage colours and textures.

Our second visit is to the Jardins d’Annevoie in the Haute-Meuse, a region of forests and rivers. The gardens of Annevoie combine the splendour and majesty of the French formal style harmoniously with English romantic whimsy and Italian refinement. As we walk through these 250-year-old water gardens they will reveal their great diversity of cascades and fountains, majestic hundred-year old trees, trimmed hornbeam lanes and false grottoes.

From Annevoie we journey to the pretty, historic riverside town of Dinant, home of people as diverse as Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone) and Joachim Patinir (the ‘inventor’ of landscape painting in Western Europe). Here we shall have time at leisure to explore the village. You may wish to visit the Collegiate Church of Our Lady or the Citadel, walk across the Charles de Gaulle Bridge with its giant futuristic saxophone sculptures, or even visit the Adolphe Sax House Museum.

From Dinant we travel east into the province of Luxembourg, the southernmost province of Wallonia. Relatively sparsely populated, about 80% of the province is covered by the densely wooded Forest of Ardennes. (Overnight Durbuy) BLD

Day 15: Wednesday 17 June, Durbuy – Wéris – Durbuy
•Nature walk to view the Wéris megaliths (6kms, 2.5hrs)
•The Maison des Mégalithes, Wéris
•Afternoon at leisure

Durbuy, nestled on the banks of the Ourthe River, is considered one of the most charming medieval towns of Wallonia. It is composed of tiny cobbled streets, timber-frame houses and a castle; it has also been home to generations of award-winning chefs. The town provides an excellent base from which to explore the Ardennes, a mountainous region of extensive forests of broadleaf and fir, rich in fauna and flora, with steep-sided valleys carved by swift-flowing rivers. Amongst its greenery lie picturesque villages, castles, forts and citadels.

This morning we enjoy a guided six-kilometre walk to the village of Wéris. A member of Les Plus Beaux Villages de Wallonie, this village is well known for its half-timbered houses of limestone or sandstone, and its megaliths, including dolmens (chambered tombs) and menhirs (standing stones) which date from 3000 BC. Whilst in Wéris we visit the Maison des Mégalithes which traces the history of the region’s megalithic sites.

This afternoon is free for you to explore Durbuy at leisure. (Overnight Durbuy) B

Maastricht – 1 night

Day 16: Thursday 18 June, Durbuy – Heers – Stokrooie – Maastricht
•Kasteel van Heks (Hex Castle), Heers
•Dina Deferme, Stokrooie

This morning we visit Hex Castle to view its world-famous rose collection. The 18th-century castle was built by Count Charles-François de Velbrück, an enlightened ruler, an advocate of liberal thought and patron of education. Originally built on a hilltop as a hunting pavilion, it was surrounded by 12 acres of formal gardens, inspired by French models including a rose garden, a Chinese garden, and a vegetable garden. De Velbrück later added a landscape park inspired by Capability Brown. The original formal Renaissance garden, which was restored by Jacques Wirtz, includes a Nut Garden and a walled vegetable garden. Today Hex is privately owned by Count Ghislain d’Ursel who carefully maintains the estate. The celebrated rose garden contains an exceptional assortment of about 250 varieties, of which the oldest were planted in the original garden. In 2003 the Garden of Roses was granted the Award of Garden Excellence by the World Federation of Rose Societies.

At midday we continue north to a wonderful 4-hectare romantic garden with an English touch, constructed around a restored farmhouse. Here, landscape architect and boarder specialist, Dina Deferme, has created a unique atmosphere using plant combinations which change colour every month. The garden, which also includes a natural pond, a shadow garden and herb garden, offers magnificent views over the surrounding countryside. Dina is author of several books including Magie van een tuin (Magic of a garden).

In the late afternoon we drive to Maastricht, located on the River Meuse in the Southern Netherlands. (Overnight Maastricht) BL

Boppard – 2 nights

Day 17: Friday 19 June, Maastricht – Neusse – Hilden – Boppard
•Museum Insel Hombroich, Neusse
•HORTVS Peter Janke Gartenkonzepte, Hilden

We begin this morning with a visit to the Museum Insel Hombroich, located in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. Art and nature unite in perfect harmony at this beautifully designed private modern art museum, scattered across eleven permanent pavilions, (‘chapels in the landscape’) set within a 25-acre nature park. Landscape designer Bernhard Korte resisted the temptation to restore the gardens of the Rosa Haus (‘Pink House’), an overgrown industrialist’s villa which was built in 1816. Instead, he created a mesmerising arcadian landscape of meadows punctuated by remnant old trees and overgrown box plants, which have long since ceased to be pruned or clipped. The valuable art collection includes Persian sculptures, Khmer art and Chinese figures dating back to the Han period placed side by side with the works of Gotthard Graubner, Jean Fautrier, Franz Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Eduardo Chillida, Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse and Kurt Schwitters.

From Neusse we drive north of Hilden to visit HORTVS, the garden and nursery of Peter Janke, who is a rising star in German landscape design. From childhood he studied plant communities in the wild, and later was inspired by the work of Beth Chatto, with whom he studied. He is that rare combination: a true plant collector with an excellent design eye. Set on 14,000m2, the garden contains over 4,000 plant varieties grown without irrigation. Throughout, there is a very strong sense of structure and rhythm, yet it is in no way a ‘formal’ planting.

In the late afternoon we drive to the beautiful small town of Boppard located in the UNESCO heritage-listed Middle Rhine. (Overnight Boppard) BLD

Day 18: Saturday 20 June, Boppard – Eltz – Braubach – Boppard
•Eltz Castle
•Medieval town of Braubach
•Marksburg Castle, Braubach
•Time at leisure

This morning we drive through the forest to Eltz Castle, a medieval fairytale castle nestled in the hills above the Moselle River. Eltz Castle is considered the German knights’ castle par excellence. It is still owned by a branch of the same family (the Eltz family) that have lived there since the 12th century, 33 generations ago and was never destroyed, so many of its original furnishings still remain in situ. The castle is surrounded on three sides by the Eltzbach River, a tributary on the north side of the Moselle. It is on a 70-metre (230 ft) rock spur, along an important Roman trade route between rich farmlands and their markets. To reach Eltz Castle, we take a short walk through the Eltz Forest, protected since 2000 as a nature reserve of 300 hectares of forest and an arboretum for its rich variety of indigenous and foreign tree species. The castle counts myths and great art as part of its history. For example, Victor Hugo, the great Romantic poet, wrote enthusiastically about the castle. William Turner, the English painter and inventor of the Rhine Romanticism, was a regular visitor and painted the castle from many different angles.

Then we drive to the beautiful small city of Braubach that nestles below its grand castle on the right bank of the Rhine. You will have lunchtime at leisure to explore its picturesque streets lined with half-timbered old houses before we drive up to Marksburg Castle that occupies a dramatic high spur above the town. In 1276 King Rudolf of Habsburg made Braubach a free city under Count Gottfried of Eppstein. Count Eberhard I of Katzenelnbogen bought the city and castle in 1283. Until 1479, his descendants constantly altered the castle. We shall take a guided tour of the castle before returning to Boppard for the night. (Overnight Boppard) BD

Rüdesheim am Rhein – 2 nights

Day 19: Sunday 21 June, Boppard – Rüdesheim am Rhein
•Cruise along the Rhine Gorge: Boppard to Rüdesheim am Rhein

Today we cruise along the Rhine Gorge (Upper Middle Rhine Valley), a UNESCO World Heritage region, from Boppard to Rüdesheim am Rhein. This 65-kilometre stretch of the Rhine between Koblenz and Bingen with its castles, half-timbered medieval villages and vineyard terraces, graphically illustrates the long history of human involvement with this dramatic and varied natural landscape. It is intimately associated with history and legend; the poetry and prose of some of Germany’s finest writers, Brentano, von Schlegel and Heine were inspired by this landscape. We shall take a cruise along the Rhine from the town of Boppard to Rüdesheim am Rhein. (Overnight Rüdesheim am Rhein) BL

Day 20: Monday 22 June, Rüdesheim am Rhein – Weinheim – Rüdesheim am Rhein
•Sichtungsgarten Hermannshof, Weinheim
•Afternoon at leisure in Rüdesheim am Rhein
•Farewell Dinner

This morning we drive to the charming medieval hilltop town of Weinheim to visit Sichtungsgarten Hermannshof, a renowned experimental botanical and trial garden encompassing 6 acres of centuries-old rolling parkland. A mecca for plantspeople and garden designers from around the world, it is considered by many to be one of the finest and most exciting modern gardens in Europe. Director Cassian Schmidt is internationally recognised for his work using natural plant communities as models for sustainable plant combinations in urban environments and private gardens. His work is at the forefront of the New Perennial movement. The garden contains over 2500 different types and species of perennials and a number of notable trees.

This afternoon we return to Rüdesheim am Rhein where there will be time to explore this winemaking town with its cobbled streets lined with historic buildings. In the evening we gather for a farewell dinner at a local restaurant. (Overnight Rüdesheim am Rhein) BD

Day 21: Tuesday 23 June, Rüdesheim am Rhein – Frankfurt Airport
•Morning at leisure
•Airport transfer for participants departing on the ASA ‘designated’ flight

The tour finishes in Rüdesheim am Rhein. Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer to the Frankfurt Airport to take their flight home to Australia in the early afternoon. If you wish to extend your stay in Germany please contact ASA for further information. B

NOTE: The above itinerary describes a range of gardens which we plan to visit. Several are accessible to the public, but many require special permission which may only be confirmed closer to the tour’s departure. The daily activities described in this itinerary may change or be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate alterations in opening hours, flight schedules and confirmation of private visits. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents prior to departure. The tour includes breakfast daily, lunches & evening meals indicated in the detailed itinerary where: B=breakfast, L=lunch and D=dinner.

Gardens of Italy: The Italian Lakes, the Piedmont, Tuscany, Umbria & Rome

Tour Highlights

•Join Deryn Thorpe, award-winning print and radio garden journalist, to tour the gardens of five distinct regions of Italy. Deryn will be accompanied by award-winning artist David Henderson, who brings a profound knowledge of European art to ASA tours.
•Enjoy the magic of northern lakeside and island gardens including Villa Carlotta, Villa Balbianello, Isola Bella and Isola Madre.
•Meet Paolo Pejrone, student of Russell Page and currently Italy’s leading garden designer. With him, view his own garden, ‘Bramafam’ and, by special appointment, the private Gardens of Casa Agnelli at Villar Perosa – one of Italy’s most splendid examples of garden design.
•View Paolo Pejrone’s work during private visits to the estate of the Peyrani family and the beautiful Tenuta Banna.
•See the work of Russell Page with an exclusive visit to the private gardens of Villa Silvio Pellico.
•Visit intimate urban gardens in Florence and Fiesole including Le Balze, designed by Cecil Pinsent; Villa di Maiano (featured in James Ivory’s film A Room with a View); and the Giardini Corsini al Prato.
•Ramble through the historical centres of lovely old cities like Turin, Lucca, Siena, Florence and Perugia, and encounter masterpieces of Italian art in major churches and museums.
•Gaze out onto the Mediterranean from the spectacularly situated Abbey of La Cervara.
•Enjoy delicious meals in the verdant surrounds of Villa di Geggiano in Tuscany and Villa Aureli in Umbria.
•Explore the great Renaissance garden designs at Villa La Foce, home of Iris Origo, author of the famous Merchant of Prato; and Villa Gamberaia at Settignano, described by Edith Wharton in her book Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904).
•Marvel at the meeting of culture and nature during an exclusive visit to Paolo Portoghesi’s stunning gardens at Calcata.
•Appreciate historic masterpieces like Villa Lante, Villa d’Este, Tivoli, and the Giardini di Ninfa.
•Take a private tour of the gardens of Palazzo Patrizi and delight in its variety of roses.
•Visit the gardens of Torrecchia Vecchia with designs by Dan Pearson and Stuart Barfoot, considered one of Italy’s most beautiful private gardens.
•Experience fine dining overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean at The Cesar Restaurant, located within the opulent mansion of the late J. Paul Getty.

 

23-day Cultural Garden Tour of Italy

Overnight Moltrasio (2 nights) • Stresa (2 nights) • Turin (4 nights) • Lucca (2 nights) • Florence (4 nights) • Siena (2 nights) • Perugia (1 night) • Viterbo (1 night) • Rome (4 nights)

Moltrasio – 2 nights

Day 1: Monday 27 April, Arrive Milan – Transfer to Moltrasio
•Welcome Meeting
•Light (2-course) dinner, La Cascata restaurant

The ASA ‘designated’ flight is scheduled to arrive at Milan’s Malpensa airport in the morning of 27 April. Those arriving on this flight will be transferred by private coach to Moltrasio. If you are travelling independently, you should meet the group at the Grand Hotel Imperiale. Private transfers from the airport to the hotel can be arranged for those arriving independently; please contact ASA for further information.

Grand Hotel Imperiale is situated on the shores of Lake Como with panoramic views of the Grigne Mountains. We shall meet in the evening for a brief introduction to the tour, followed by a light dinner at the hotel’s La Cascata restaurant. (Overnight Moltrasio) D

Day 2: Tuesday 28 April, Moltrasio – Tremezzo – Bellagio – Moltrasio
•Villa Carlotta, Tremezzo
•Villa Melzi, Bellagio (optional)
•Villa del Balbianello, Bellagio
•Welcome Dinner, Imperialino restaurant

This morning we cruise across Lake Como to 18th-century Villa Carlotta, a garden with a huge botanical collection and a traditional Italian formal design, unlike most lake gardens that were heavily influenced by the more fluid layouts of English landscape gardening; it thus has a wide variety of architectural features – parterres, stairways, ponds, fountains, etc. In April and May Villa Carlotta offers a sea of multi-coloured azaleas shaped in high, rounded cushions alongside the garden paths.

During the lunch break there will be some time at leisure to visit Villa Melzi (optional).

This afternoon we visit Villa del Balbianello, an exquisite villa set in woods of pine, soaring cypress and oak with pollarded plane trees and manicured lawns and flowerbeds. Facing the promontory of Serbelloni, from the Lavedo point it boasts unparalleled views down the three branches of the lake. The first villa was built in 1540, but was later moved to a new site inland to protect it from flooding. Cardinal Durini erected a casino with a loggia in 1790, open to the sun and breezes; today it is trellised with Ficus pumila (creeping fig) and flanked by a library and music room.

This evening we meet in the hotel’s Imperialino restaurant for our Welcome Dinner. (Overnight Moltrasio) BD

Stresa – 2 nights

Day 3: Wednesday 29 April, Moltrasio – Bisuschio – Casalzuigno – Stresa
•Villa Cicogna Mozzoni, Bisuschio
•Villa Della Porta Bozzolo, Casalzuigno

We depart Moltrasio to visit Villa Cicogna Mozzoni, located on a steep hillside in the village of Bisuschio. Its garden looks out upon sweeping views, with a glimpse of Lake Lugano. Founded in the 15th century, the villa took its present form in the 16th century. The Cicogna family, who inherited it in 1580, still owns this lovely villa. The formal gardens rise on 7 narrow terraces and adjacent to them is a small sunken garden with formal box parterres and patches of lawn. We tour the villa residence, which houses a fine antique collection. Above the villa is a great terrace with Renaissance grottoes offering shade in summer, and a magnificent water stair. Flowing water was an essential feature of Italian formal gardens, offering a cooling spectacle and a lively, burbling sound.

After lunchtime at leisure we visit Villa Della Porta Bozzolo, which is unusual for Lombardy because its measured stately design is laid out upon a steep slope. Parterres, terraces with stone balustrades and grand stairways flanking fountains rise to an octagonal clearing, or theatre, surrounded by a thick ring of cypresses and woods. The perspective rises further to the villa, set to one side in order not to interrupt the silvan view. We continue to our hotel located on the shores of Lake Maggiore. (Overnight Stresa) B

Day 4: Thursday 30 April, Stresa – Lake Maggiore – Lake Orta – Stresa
•Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore
•Isola Madre, Lake Maggiore
•Orta San Giulio & Isola San Giulio, Lake Orta

We take the ferry across Lake Maggiore to Count Carlo Borromeo’s Isola Bella (1632), one of Italy’s most extraordinary Baroque gardens. Located on an island off Stresa, it appears to float like a palatial barge, with 10 terraces rising like a ship’s prow from the reflecting waters. It shares the island with the Borromeo palace and its adjacent village.

We also visit Isola Madre, with semi-tropical plantings amongst which white peacocks roam. In 1845, Flaubert wrote, “Isola Madre is the most sensual place that I have ever seen in the world”. It has a fine swamp cypress, citrus fruit trees, crape myrtle, hibiscus, leptospermum and acacias. The landscape woods have groves of native trees – aromatic cypress, bay and pine – interplanted with camphor, pepper trees and styrax. Its pathways are lined with magnolias, camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas.

This afternoon we visit Lake Orta, to the west of Lake Maggiore, a tiny jewel surrounded by hills and mountains acting as a great natural theatre enveloping local towns and villages. The most beautiful of these is Orta San Giulio, whose town hall has a frescoed façade. Its narrow streets are lined with Rococo houses. We take a ferry to Isola San Giulio to visit the 12th-century Romanesque church whose pulpit is one of the outstanding masterpieces of medieval sculpture in northern Italy. (Overnight Stresa) B

Turin – 4 nights

Day 5: Friday 1 May, Stresa – Turin
•Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli

This morning we make our way south from Stresa to Turin, Italy’s first capital city after unification and home to the House of Savoy. Here we visit the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli. Giovanni Agnelli was in 1899 one of the original founders of what became the Fiat motor company. The Agnelli family, ‘the Kennedys of Italy’, are also known for their ownership of Ferrari since 1969 and as majority owners of the Juventus Football Club. Donna Marella Agnelli, of the Italian noble house of Caracciolo, was a renowned style icon, garden designer, author and photographer, as well as art collector. She passed away only recently, in February 2019, at the age of 91. The Pinacoteca, opened in 2002, displays 25 masterpieces from Giovanni and Marella Agnelli’s private art collection. We shall visit the gallery known as the ‘Scrigno’, or ‘treasure chest’, which houses twenty-three paintings and two sculptures, including works by Matisse, Balla, Severini, Modigliani, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Picasso, Renoir, Manet and Canova. The space itself is a work of art, having been designed by Renzo Piano inside Turin’s historic industrial complex of Lingotto. (Overnight Turin) BL

Day 6: Saturday 2 May, Turin
•Orientation walk of Turin, including guided visits to the Palazzo Reale, Cathedral & Palazzo Madama
•Afternoon and evening at leisure

This morning we will enjoy an orientation walk of the city’s centre with a local guide. Our walk will include a visit to Turin’s Palazzo Reale (Royal Palace), seat of the House of Savoy (1646-1859) and of Vittorio Emanuele II, King of Italy (1860-1865). This grand palace, a major essay in Italian Baroque and Rococo, has sumptuous decorations and furniture from all periods. We will also visit Turin’s Palazzo Madama, a medieval castle behind a Baroque façade, with a major art collection that includes Antonello da Messina’s Portrait of a Man. This afternoon and evening we will be at leisure to enjoy Turin. (Overnight Turin) B

Day 7: Sunday 3 May, Turin – Revello – Moncalieri – Turin
•Bramafam, Paolo Pejrone’s private experimental garden (exclusive private visit with owner & designer Paolo Pejrone)
•Villa Silvio Pellico –Private tour of the gardens and part of the Villa with the owners & lunch (exclusive private visit)

We are particularly privileged today to meet Italy’s leading landscape architect, Paolo Pejrone, and visit his own very private garden, designed not so much for its aesthetics, but rather as a laboratory in which the master is constantly experimenting with new plantings. Set on a steep escarpment near a ruined medieval rampart from which ‘Bramafam’ takes its name, the garden and its owner’s discussions with you will give precious, unique insights into his ideas and practice.

Villa Silvio Pellico is a fine Neo-Gothic mansion (1780) with a Russell Page garden, arguably one of his three masterpieces. Page had gained an understanding of the Italian and French formal tradition of gardening from Edith Wharton and Geoffrey Jellicoe. On an ill-kempt hillside in the 1950s he created a fine terraced garden on two axes divided by pools; Page was particularly sensitive to the use of water in gardens. Symmetrical hedges create a series of ‘rooms’ of different designs, using diverse vegetation and ground patterns, as well as sculptures. The present owner, Raimonda Lanza di Trabia, daughter of the last Prince of Trabia (Sicily), and her husband Emanuele Gamna, will host us for lunch and a private tour of this extraordinary property. (Overnight Turin) BL

Day 8: Monday 4 May, Turin – Villar Perosa/Moncalieri – Poirino– Turin
•Gardens of Casa Agnelli at Villar Perosa or Private Garden of Silvana and Alberto Peyrani (exclusive private visit; to be confirmed)
•Tenuta Banna, Poirino (exclusive private visit)

This morning we visit the exquisite gardens of Casa Agnelli, set on a private estate which has been home to the Agnelli family since the early 1800s. In 1955 Marella Agnelli commissioned Russell Page and together they transformed the gardens. The swimming pool area was designed by renowned architect Gae Aulenti and other parts of the garden were developed by Paolo Pejrone. The grounds offer a range of styles: Italianate formal gardens; a water garden with interconnecting lakes; an English-style woodland walk, a romantic garden, sculpture gardens and more.

Please note that the visit to the gardens of Casa Agnelli cannot be confirmed until 2-4 weeks prior to our tour’s departure. In the event that they cannot be visited, we shall visit Moncalieri to view the private garden designed by Paolo Pejrone for Silvana and Alberto Peyrani. Pejrone surrounded their villa with extensive new gardens, including decorative orchards and a fine potager.

The private estate of Tenuta Banna is owned by Marchese and Marchesa Spinola and is home to the Spinola-Banna Foundation for Art. In the 1990s Paolo Pejrone designed a modern garden around the property’s large farmhouse and adjoining church and castle. He created a series of enclosed gardens ‘organised like a Persian carpet’; they include a secret garden planted with wisterias and peonies, a potager, and a rose garden with an abundance of colour and variety. (Overnight Turin) B

Lucca – 2 nights

Day 9: Tuesday 5 May, Turin – Santa Margherita Ligure – La Cervara – Lucca
•Abbey of San Girolamo al Monte di Portofino (La Cervara)
•Group Dinner at Gli Orti di Via Elisa restaurant

We drive southeast along the grand Ligurian coast to the magnificent Abbey of San Girolamo al Monte di Portofino. Located in a strategic position atop a rocky headland that overlooks the Tigullio Gulf, it was founded as a Benedictine monastery in 1361. The monks’ former vegetable garden was transformed into what is now the only monumental Italian formal garden in the Liguria region. It extends over two levels connected by arbors and steps. On the lower level, hedges of boxwood (Buxus sempervirens) are trimmed into ornate stepped cones, an important example of topiary art. The hedges surround a 17th-century marble fountain in the form of a putto, whose underlying basin is tinged with pink water lilies in summer.

After visiting this grand garden, we continue to Lucca and check in to the Hotel Ilaria, which occupies the restored stables of the Villa Bottini inside the city walls. In the evening we dine together at Gli Orti di Via Elisa restaurant, located near the hotel. (Overnight Lucca) BD

Day 10: Wednesday 6 May, Lucca
•Orientation tour of Lucca incl. Cathedral of San Martino, Basilica San Frediano and the Piazza del Mercato
•Palazzo Pfanner
•Afternoon at leisure
•Recital of Italian Opera at the church of San Giovanni

Lucca is one of the most beautiful of all Italian cities, with city walls graced by grand plantations of trees and one of the finest sets of Romanesque churches in Italy. We visit the Cathedral of St. Martin, with a lovely Jacopo della Quercia tomb, and view the spectacular façade of the church of San Michele, made up of complex blind galleries with capricious sculptures of beasts. San Michele was built in the ancient forum of the city; Lucca’s medieval street plan follows the original Roman plan. The oval Piazza del Mercato’s medieval palaces were built into the structure of Lucca’s Roman amphitheatre. San Frediano, meanwhile, has a distinctive façade mosaic and a unique baptismal font that was once a medieval fountain.

After lunch we visit the privately owned 17th-century Palazzo Pfanner, where parts of Portrait of a Lady were filmed (1996). The palace’s owner, Dario Pfanner, will introduce his palace and its Baroque garden, a fine example of an urban garden that includes various statues of Olympian deities and a fountain pond. Its elegant lemon house (limonaia) inflects a space defined by boxwood and laurel hedges. Bushes of peonies and hortensias, roses and potted geraniums gain shade from yews, pines, magnolias and an old camellia. Inside, the palace’s piano nobile (main reception room) features Pietro Paolo Scorsini frescoes (c.1720).

The remainder of the afternoon is at leisure. You may wish to walk a section of Lucca’s 17th-century city walls, the best preserved in Italy. The Lucchesi planted trees atop these walls to form a promenade enlivened by small gardens and lawns. We attend an evening concert with a selection from Italian operas, including many by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), a native of Lucca, in the church of San Giovanni. (Overnight Lucca) B

Florence – 4 nights

Day 11: Thursday 7 May, Lucca – Camigliano – Capannori – San Piero a Sieve – Florence
•Villa Torrigiani, Camigliano
•Lunch at a Tuscan osteria
•Medici Castello del Trebbio, San Piero a Sieve

During the Renaissance, the wealthy merchant families of Tuscany built grand villas on the plains of Lucca. We visit 17th-century Villa Torrigiani, named after the camellia that was introduced to the gardens in the early 18th century. The garden’s Baroque layout, attributed to André Le Nôtre, features symmetrical reflecting pools in front of the villa. Most outstanding is the secret garden (Giardino di Flora), with regular beds, topiary and pools. The garden features 19th-century trees, magnificent magnolias, cypresses and umbrella pines. The 18th-century avenue of cypresses leading to the villa from the village of Borgonuovo reflects the past grandeur of estates in this region.

We eat a traditional Tuscan lunch at nearby osteria before continuing our journey eastward toward Castello il Trebbio in San Piero a Sieve.

“Set on a hilltop in the Apennines north of Florence, a few kilometres west of San Piero a Sieve, Castello del Trebbio is one of the oldest villas built by the Medici, who came from the Mugello and chose their native region for their first villas. The head of the Medici clan, Giovanni di Bicci, owned the property from the late 14th century, and upon his death in 1428, the villa was inherited by Cosimo the Elder, who commissioned Michelozzo di Bartolomeo to rebuild the original castle.

The walled garden set on two terraces is noteworthy as it was among the first of its kind to be designed for a villa. The upper terrace of the well-preserved garden, a veritable hortus conclusus, is decorated with a long pergola made up of a double row of columns and sandstone capitals in various styles (ionic and decorated with foliage motifs), which support a thick covering of vines. As can be seen in the lunette painted by Giusto Utens between 1599 and 1602, there was a second pergola (now lost) on the lower terrace, which retains the original layout of a vegetable garden with a pond, as well as planting designed by Michelozzo to satisfy not only defensive requirements, but also Cosimo’s spiritual desire for a contemplative life.” (The Medici Villas: Complete Guide by Isabella Lapi Ballerini & Mario Scalini).

In the late afternoon we arrive at our hotel in central Florence. (Overnight Florence) BL

Day 12: Friday 8 May, Florence – Fiesole – Florence
•Villa Medici in Fiesole
•Villa Le Balze (to be confirmed)
•Lunch at Fattoria di Maiano
•Villa di Maiano: Guided tour of the Villa
•Villa di Maiano: Guided tour of the gardens with landscape architect Marco Battaggia

Unlike the grand villa gardens we have visited near Lucca, Florence and its vicinity have a number of small intimate urban gardens that we visit today. Many of these offer glimpses of the city, a counterpart to the spectacular views afforded by their grander Florentine counterparts. Such views offer a reminder that Florentine villas were seen as retreats from this metropolitan powerhouse. We make an early morning visit to elegant Fiesole in the hills overlooking Florence where Boccaccio set his Decameron, model for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Boccaccio’s protagonists told stories to while away their days in a Fiesole villa in which they had escaped from the plague ravaging Florence. Our first visit is to the garden of 16th-century Villa Medici in Fiesole. The garden, showing Cecil Pinsent’s influence, is divided into three terraces with a limonaia. We shall then walk to neighbouring Villa Le Balze. Now a University of Georgetown study centre, it has a small formal garden and olive grove designed by Englishman Cecil Pinsent, with breathtaking views over Florence.

After some time to explore Fiesole’s town centre at leisure, we transfer a short distance by coach to nearby Fattoria di Maiano, where we shall partake in a a Tuscan lunch together. The Fattoria is the organic farm and olive grove of Villa di Maiano; here we shall indulge in local specialties such as cheeses, cold cuts, and risotto al Chianti.

The Villa di Maiano can count Queen Victoria among its guests; it has also provided the set for numerous films, including James Ivory’s A Room with a View and Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea with Mussolini. Among the villa’s past owners are members of the famous Sforza and Pazzi families. However, it was wealthy Englishman Sir John Temple Leader who, after acquiring the property in 1844, renovated the villa, its gardens and the surrounding structures. We’ll take a guided tour of the Villa, including a special visit to the first floor. We shall also visit the the gardens with prominent Italian landscape architect Marco Battaggia. (Please note that Arch. Battaggia’s presence will be confirmed approximately one week before the visit). (Overnight Florence) BL

Day 13: Saturday 9 May, Florence
•Palazzo Corsini al Prato: Visits to the garden & palazzo; Refreshments
•Afternoon at leisure

We begin our day with a visit to to the Giardino Corsini al Prato, a Florentine urban garden that illustrates the deep connection between nature, science and beauty in the Renaissance sensibility. Alessandro Acciaioli, a passionate 16th-century botanist, conceived the garden. Unable to finish his residence, he was forced to sell the property to Filippo di Lorenzo Corsini, who completed the Italian garden that remains unchanged to this day. Completely concealed from the street by the façade of the palazzo, this urban garden reveals pink and red rock roses, peonies, cherry trees and lavender along with elegant lemon urns and a central axis of solemn marble statues. After our tour of the gardens, Princess Giorgiana Corsini has kindly arranged for us a tour of her palace, followed by refreshments.

The afternoon is at leisure to explore Florence’s many monuments and museums. (Overnight Florence) B

Day 14: Sunday 10 May, Florence
•Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi
•Museo di San Marco
•Afternoon at leisure

We depart from the hotel on foot and make a visit to the Palazzo Medici Riccardi to view Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes of the Procession of the Magi in the small Magi Chapel. The sumptuous procession, which includes representations of Medici family members, is set in an ideal Tuscan landscape, which forms a fascinating comparison to the gardens we visit and countryside through which we drive.

Our next visit is to the monastery of San Marco, where Dominican monks contemplated the faith in images by Fra Angelico. Here, Cosimo de’Medici had his own cell for religious retreats, and commissioned Michelozzo to design the monks’ cloister and the reading library for his manuscripts. The monastery holds numerous artistic treasures, including a Last Supper by Ghirlandaio in the refectory, and Fra Angelico’s famous Annunciation.

We have another afternoon at leisure to enjoy Florence. (Overnight Florence) B

Siena – 2 nights

Day 15: Monday 11 May, Florence – Settignano – Pianella – Siena
•Villa Gamberaia, Settignano
•Villa di Geggiano, Pianella – including buffet lunch (exclusive private visit)

We drive to Siena via two famous Tuscan villas. At Settignano we visit the Villa Gamberaia, with arguably the most famous of Florentine villa gardens. The Capponi family initiated the present garden in 1718. In 1896, Princess Ghika of Serbia created the main water parterres in front of the villa. The Marchi family has recently restored the garden. It features magnificent topiary, two fine grottoes, and wonderful old cypresses and pines. By special arrangement, we also tour the interiors of the villa which combines interesting architectural features of both an urban palazzo and suburban villa.

This afternoon we cross to the opposite side of the Sienese hills to the enchanting Villa Geggiano. Here, centuries-old cypress, potted lemons and clipped box hedges adorn a garden boasting a unique ‘greenery theatre’, late Baroque sculptures, a kitchen garden with topiary art and a semi-circular fishpond that forms an elegant terrace overlooking Siena. The villa itself contains original 13th-century furnishings. A small chapel faces the garden. Lunch features crostini with porcini mushrooms and truffles, pasta, various locally cured meats and Pecorino cheeses, followed by plum jam tart, all washed down with Villa di Geggiano Chianti Classico, mineral water and coffee.

In the afternoon we continue to our hotel on the outskirts of Siena, a villa surrounded by gardens. (Overnight Siena) BL

Day 16: Tuesday 12 May, Siena
•Orientation tour of Siena, including Palazzo Pubblico, Cathedral & Museum
•Afternoon at leisure

Siena is the quintessential medieval city. We explore Lorenzetti’s fascinating paintings of Good and Bad Government in the Civic Museum, located in the Palazzo Pubblico, and Duccio’s masterpiece, the Maestà, in the Cathedral Museum. We examine Nicola and Giovanni Pisano’s great pulpit in Siena Cathedral. We also visit medieval quarters (contrade) dominated by palaces still occupied by the families who built them. The contrade compete in the famous palio horse race twice a year. Protected by the Virgin Mary, Siena is a city of Trinitarian symbolism. Built on three ridges, it has three major sectors (terzi) that each elected three members of the city council, and interpreted its very architectural fabric in such symbolic terms. The afternoon is at leisure to explore Siena’s many monuments and museums. (Overnight Siena) B

Perugia – 1 night

Day 17: Wednesday 13 May, Siena – Chianciano Terme – Castel del Piano Umbro – Perugia
•Villa La Foce, Chianciano Terme (by special appointment)
•Private gardens of Villa Aureli, Castel del Piano Umbro

We drive south to the Renaissance Villa La Foce, home of Iris Origo, author of the famous Merchant of Prato. Origo’s two autobiographies, Images and Shadows and War in Val d’Orcia, vividly describe life on the estate in the mid-20th century. La Foce overlooks the Orcia valley and Amiata Mountains, maintaining a distinctive harmony between its spectacular landscape setting and the formal style of surrounding gardens. Terraces with cherries, pines, cypress and wild herbs gently climb its hillside setting. Now a centre for cultural and artistic activities, it hosts the distinguished Incontri chamber annual summer music festival in the Castelluccio, a medieval castle on the property.

Count Sperello di Serego Alighieri, a descendent of Dante, will host us for a light lunch and show us his lovely Villa Aureli. Shaded by lime trees and oaks and decorated with many late antique vases containing citrus trees, the villa dates to the middle of the 18th century, when a Perugian nobleman and artist, Count Sperello Aureli, transformed a 16th-century tower into his country residence. Of particular note is the orangery, whose high roof is reminiscent of the hull of an upturned ship.

We continue to Perugia, where we spend the night in the luxury Hotel Brufani Palace, located on a hilltop within Perugia’s historic core. (Overnight Perugia) BL

Viterbo – 1 night

Day 18: Thursday 14 May, Perugia – Bagnaia – Viterbo
•Orientation Walk, Perugia, including Cathedral & Fontana Maggiore
•Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia
•Villa Lante, Bagnaia

This morning we take a gentle orientation walk of Perugia, including visits to its Cathedral and Fontana Maggiore. We then visit the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria to view masterpieces including works by Perugino.

Our next stop is the great garden of Villa Lante. Villa Lante is the consummate example of Italian Mannerist garden design. Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s exemplary essay in fine scale and proportion centres on a fountain and water parterre. Vignola was influenced by the Vatican gardens, the Villa d’Este, Hadrian’s marine theatre and the Boboli Gardens (Florence). Its theme, humanity’s descent from the Golden Age, is based upon Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Water flows from the Grotto of the Deluge at the summit down a stepped cascade and through a channel at the centre of a vast stone table used for banquets, inspired by Pliny’s description of an imperial garden table using water to cool wine and fruit. In the late afternoon, we drive a short distance to our hotel located in the countryside outside Viterbo. (Overnight Viterbo) BD

Rome – 4 nights

Day 19: Friday 15 May, Viterbo – Calcata – Vignanello – Rome
•Gardens of Paolo Portoghesi, Calcata (exclusive private visit; to be confirmed)
•Castello Ruspoli, Vignanello

This morning we visit the private garden of distinguished architect and scholar Paolo Portoghesi. The garden reinterprets Baroque elements and Borrominian forms, and fuses geometry with nature to produce a garden which is both spectacularly modern and at the same time, reverent toward the traditions upon which it draws.

Castello Ruspoli occupies the site of a mid-9th century Benedictine convent later converted to a military stronghold. Ortensia Baglioni transformed it into a villa, designed by the great architects Sangallo and Vignola, and succeeding generations created one of Italy’s most beautiful parterres, composed of hedges of bay, laurel and box, which articulate a vast rectangular space. The Princess Ruspoli today maintains the gardens. (Overnight Rome) B

Day 20: Saturday 16 May, Rome – Ninfa – Cisterna – Rome
•Giardini di Ninfa
•Tenuta di Torrecchia Vecchia (exclusive private visit; to be confirmed)

We depart this morning at approximately 8.00am for the Giardini di Ninfa. The magnificent gardens of Ninfa, south of Rome, are some of the most remarkable in all of Italy. Today, their gates will open for a special private visit for our group. The town of Ninfa is but a memory of a once prosperous medieval commune owned by the Caetani family since the mid-13th century. In the early 20th century the family began to regenerate its ruins, taking advantage of a microclimate greened by rich spring water. Thousands of species were introduced from all over the world under the guidance of botanical experts. Lelia Caetani, the last of her ancient family, died in 1977 and bequeathed her property to the Caetani Foundation, which maintains the wonderfully atmospheric gardens. Today plants weave themselves over ruined towers, ancient archways and churches, while ducks and swans glide on the castle’s moat. Highlights include a walled garden, small orchard and diverse plantings in which roses, banana trees and maples thrive together in this unique and beautiful landscape.

Nearby, we enjoy a picnic lunch and visit the dreamy gardens of Torrecchia, one of Italy’s most beautiful private gardens. Nestled against the crumbling ruins of a medieval village and castle, perched on a volcanic hilltop just south of Rome, they command spectacular views of the unspoilt 1500-acre estate. Owned by Carlo Caracciolo (the late owner of the Italian newspaper L’Espresso) and Violante Visconti, the gardens were originally designed by Lauro Marchetti, the current curator of the Giardini di Ninfa, and further developed by the English garden designer Dan Pearson and later by Stuart Barfoot. (Overnight Rome) BL

Day 21: Sunday 17 May, Rome – Tivoli – Rome
•Villa d’Este, Tivoli
•Time at leisure in Rome

Set among the hanging cliffs of the Valle Gaudente, the Villa d’Este and its surrounding gardens and waterworks has undergone a series of innovative extensions in layout and decoration, including those of Bernini in the late 17th century. This UNESCO world heritage site boasts an impressive concentration of nymphaea, grottoes and fountains, including the famous hydraulic Organ Fountain that still operates. The Villa d’Este’s use of water and music became the definitive model for Mannerist and Baroque gardens across Europe.

After time at leisure for lunch in Tivoli, we return to Rome, arriving at approximately 3.00pm. The rest of the afternoon and the evening is at leisure. (Overnight Rome) B

Day 22: Monday 18 May, Rome – Castel Giuliano – Palo Laziale – Rome
•Palazzo Patrizi, Castel Giuliano (exclusive private visit)
•Farewell Lunch at The Cesar Restaurant, La Posta Vecchia Hotel, home of the late J. Paul Getty

The estate of Castel Giuliano, surrounded by a beautiful century-old park, occupies the site of an Etruscan and Roman settlement at the foot of the Tolfa Mountains. The Patrizi family has owned it since 1546 and its present owners have restored its ancient buildings and park to their former splendour. On its wide, gently sloping turf terraces, pines, cluster oaks, and century-old Lebanon cedars tower above sweet-scented herbs and flower-laden bushes, contrasting unruly nature with human interventions. The park has numerous Etruscan tombs and ruins of Roman walls covered in ferns and lichen. Truly unique, it is one of Italy’s most important private rose gardens; in May it hosts the famous ‘Festival of the Roses’. Climbing roses soften the austere lines of the ancient castle walls, which are surrounded by combinations of shrubbery and foxglove, myrtle and pale blue ceanothus.

We finish our tour with a special dining experience at The Cesar restaurant. With a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, The Cesar is the restaurant of luxury hotel La Posta Vecchia. The dishes, designed by renowned chef Antonio Magliulo, are traditional Italian style with a contemporary twist. They are prepared with fresh local ingredients, including produce from the property’s organic garden. The opulent villa is surrounded by manicured gardens. It was bought by J. Paul Getty in the 1960s and sumptuously restored. Built in the 17th century to house visitors to the neighbouring Odescalchi Castle, the villa remained in a state of disrepair for decades until Getty purchased it and restored it to its former glory. During excavations for a swimming pool, the foundations of an ancient Roman villa – said to be the weekend retreat of Julius Caesar – were discovered, and Getty spared no expense in preserving the remains. On the lower level of the villa is a museum in which the mosaic floors, walls, pottery and first-century artefacts are on display. We make a short visit to the museum and say our farewells as we return to Rome. (Overnight Rome) BL

Day 23: Tuesday 19 May, Depart Rome
•Airport transfer for participants departing on the ASA ‘designated’ flight

The tour ends in Rome. Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer to the airport to take their flight home to Australia. Alternatively, you may wish to extend your stay in Italy. Please contact ASA if you require further assistance. B

Autumn & the Art of the Japanese Garden

Tour Highlights

 

•Travel with Jim Fogarty, award-winning landscape architect and author, on this tour of Japan in autumn, when Japan’s countryside explodes into symphonies of glorious colour.
•Visit a diverse range of Japan’s traditional gardens including: Kinkaku-ji (the Golden Pavilion) & Ryoan-ji (Dragon Peace Temple) in Kyoto, Isui-en in Nara, Kenroku-en in Kanazawa and Koraku-en in Okayama. We also visit a number of small gardens by special appointment. Each garden follows a spiritual and artistic tradition and demonstrates the incredible diverse artistry of the Japanese garden.
•Explore some of Japan’s splendid art collections, including Tokyo’s National Museum and Nara Museum, the Ukiyo-e Museum outside Matsumoto with an impressive woodblock collection, and the magnificent collection of kimonos at Itchiku Kubota Art Museum at the foot of Mt Fuji.
•Stroll along Kyoto’s charming Philosopher’s Walk and visit historic homes in Tokyo and Kanazawa.
•Visit the Jiyu Gakuen School in Tokyo, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright when he lived in Japan.
•Experience Japan’s unique culture at a tea ceremony in Kanazawa and lunch at the delightful teahouse of Happo-en in Tokyo.
•View the great Buddha at Nara’s impressive Todai-ji complex, the world’s largest timber building.
•Walk the Kiso Valley’s historic Nakasendo Highway, passing through wooden groves and villages with the distinctive wooden architecture of the Edo era. Enjoy a reviving green tea in a wayside teahouse and enjoy the glorious views over the countryside.
•Stay one night in Nara in a ryokan – a traditional Japanese inn (or in western-style accommodation at the historic Nara Hotel).
•Sample an array of traditional cuisine types, including shabu-shabu, teppan-yaki, oskashi and kaiseki.
•Conclude with a visit to the Adachi Museum of Art, where a collection of contemporary Japanese art is harmoniously set within one of the most beautiful and admired contemplative gardens in the country.

 

Overview

The tour has been timed to visit Japan when its countryside explodes into symphonies of glorious autumnal colour. In Tokyo and in historic centres like Kyoto and Nara we’ll discover how Japan’s gardens can be experienced on many levels and are renowned for subtly combining artifice and nature, blurring the boundaries between garden and landscape. Some gardens are tiny and minimalist, conveying subtle meanings through ingenious combinations of moss, stones, rock and water.

Others are grand, framing rich palaces and temples like Tokyo’s Imperial Palace Garden. In Tokyo, highlights include Happo-en where ladies in kimonos serve lunch in a delightful teahouse before we stroll through the gardens viewing 200-year-old bonsai trees. Tokyo National Museum offers masterpieces to inspire you, and we will explore examples of contemporary garden design and landscaping in this most modern city. Kyoto gardens include such extensive, ancient temple and garden complexes as Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion), Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) and Ryoan-ji – the famed Dragon Peace Temple. Throughout, garden visits are also combined with an appreciation of Japan’s traditional architecture and great museums to enrich our understanding of Japanese aesthetics. In 8th-century capital Nara, architectural treasures, great collections and fine gardens include the Todai-ji, the world’s largest timber building, Kofuku-ji with a five-storey pagoda and treasure trove of Buddhist statues; we also visit the more intimate Isui-en and Yoshiki-en gardens. At Kanazawa we explore traditional construction techniques at Kanazawa Castle, Nagamachi Samurai Residence and Higashichaya District’s many old Samurai houses. Kanazawa’s Kenroku-en is the ‘garden of the six sublimities’ and this is the setting for our experience of a traditional tea ceremony. We also make a very special day tour to villages in Kiso Valley, carefully preserved monuments to Japan’s feudal past, and stroll Japan’s greatest natural symbol, Mt Fuji. Our tour finishes with a visit to the Adachi Museum of Art. In addition to its stunning collection of contemporary Japanese art, the museum is renowned for its beautiful contemplation garden which visitors enjoy through large picture windows.

 

16-day Cultural Garden Tour of Japan in Autumn

Overnight Tokyo (3 nights) • Kawaguchiko (1 night) • Matsumoto (2 nights) • Kanazawa (1 night) • Kyoto (3 nights) • Nara (1 night) • Kyoto (3 nights) • Matsue (1 night)

Tokyo – 3 nights

Day 1: Wednesday 4 November, Arrive Tokyo
•Arrival transfer for those travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight
•Japanese Imperial Palace Plaza
•Koishikawa Koraku-en Garden
•Light Dinner

After our arrival in Tokyo those taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight will be transferred in a private vehicle to the Hotel New Otani Tokyo. This hotel stands within a beautiful traditional Japanese garden originally designed for the daimyo (feudal lord) Kato Kiyomasa, Lord of Kumamoto in Kyustiu over four hundred years ago. This garden is well worth strolling through and will introduce you to many facets of the Japanese gardens we shall visit in the coming weeks.

After time to rest at the hotel, we begin our tour with a visit to the Japanese Imperial Palace Plaza, the home of the reigning emperor of Japan and his family. We enter via the Nijubashi, where two picturesque bridges span the moat. The Higashi Gyo-en, or East Garden, was opened to the public in 1968 and provides an attractive environment in which to stroll and relax.

We then visit a rare surviving 17th-century strolling garden, located in the west of the city. Koishikawa Koraku-en was designed in part by Zhu Shun Shui, a Ming dynasty refugee from China, and the garden recreates both Japanese and Chinese landscapes. Here we find waterfalls, ponds, stone lanterns, a small lake with gnarled pines and humped bridges.

Tonight we enjoy a light dinner together at our hotel. (Overnight Tokyo) D

Day 2: Thursday 5 November, Tokyo
•Suntory Museum of Art
•Happo-en Garden
•Lunch at Happo-en Gardens Teahouse
•Nezu Museum

The Suntory Museum of Art was founded in Tokyo’s Marunouchi district in 1961 as the cultural arm of a famous distillery. ‘Beauty in Everyday Life’ has been the theme of the museum since its establishment when the then President of Suntory, Keizo Saji, developed what is now a 3,000-piece collection containing priceless ceramics, folding screens, kimonos, lacquer-ware, textiles and glasswork. Its aim is to relate old things to the new, present beauty over time, and to represent beauty without regard for cultural frontiers of countries and races.

To enhance this philosophy of fusing the ‘traditional’ with the ‘contemporary’, the museum relocated in 2007 to its current Tokyo Mid-town location to be part of the art district known as the Roppongi art triangle. Architect Kengo Kuma, whose aim was to create ‘a Japanese-style room in the city’, designed its new home using new technology and traditional Japanese design elements. The architect’s signature vertical lattice design covers the exterior, while the interior features a sliding 10-metre-high lattice that controls the flow of light. Natural materials like laminated paulownia wood for the interior lattice, washi for the atrium walls, and recycled whiskey barrel wood (a connection to the Suntory distillery) for the flooring create a feeling of warmth throughout the building.

Meaning ‘beautiful from any angle’, the Happo-en garden lives up to its name. Following a Welcome Lunch at the garden’s delightful teahouse, where ladies in kimono will serve you matcha (green tea) and okashi (variety of snacks), a stroll through the gardens will reveal 200-year-old bonsai trees, a stone lantern said to have been carved 800 years ago, and a central pond.

Our day concludes with a visit to the Nezu Museum, showcasing traditional Japanese and Asian works of art once owned by Kaichiro Nezu, a railroad magnate and politician. Architect Kengo Kuma designed an arched roof that rises two floors and extends roughly half a block through the Minami Aoyama neighborhood. At any one time the vast space houses some of the collection’s 7,000 works of calligraphy, paintings, sculptures, bronzes, and lacquer ware. The purpose of our visit however, is to explore the building’s surroundings – one of Tokyo’s finest gardens with 5 acres of ponds, rolling paths, waterfalls, and teahouses. (Overnight Tokyo) BL

Day 3: Friday 6 November, Tokyo
•Jiyu Gakuen School
•Tokyo National Museum
•Ekouin Nenbutsudo Temple by Yutaka Kawahara Design Studio

We begin our day with a visit to the Jiyu Gakuen School. This is a beautifully preserved building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1921, one of 12 buildings the American designed during the two years he lived in Japan. Only three of Wright’s buildings survived the 20th century, and we shall be taken on a tour of this very special building.

Established in 1872, the Tokyo National Museum is the oldest and largest museum in Japan. The museum, which holds over 110,000 objects, focuses on ancient Japanese art and Asian art along the Silk Road. There is also a large collection of Greco-Buddhist art.

During our travels we’ll encounter many traditional and historic temples and explore a variety of gardens that play such an important role in these complexes. This afternoon we visit a contemporary temple – the Ekouin Nenbutsudo Temple by Yutaka Kawahara Design Studio. Completed in 2013, in the lively heart of Tokyo, this Buddhist complex is intended to represent the ‘Gokuraku’ or ‘Paradise in the Sky’ and is comprised of the three traditional structures associated with Buddhist architecture – the vihara (monastery), the stupa (pagoda), and the shrine – stacked one atop the other in response to its compact site. In place of a small stroll garden using moss, stone or sand, here bamboo is used to create a green space for contemplation in this busy metropolis. (Overnight Tokyo) B

Kawaguchiko – 1 night

Day 4: Saturday 7 November, Tokyo – Kawaguchiko
•Sankei-en (Sankei’s Garden)
•Fifth Station of Mt Fuji

Today we depart Tokyo by coach and travel west to the iconic Mount Fuji, the largest volcano in Japan. This is Japan’s highest peak at 3,776 metres. It last erupted in 1707 and forms a near perfect cone. Mount Fuji is arguably Japan’s most important landmark, which stands for the nation’s identity. It has been pictured countless times, not least in Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1826-1833).

On the way to Mount Fuji we visit the beautiful Sankei-en, a spacious Japanese-style garden in southern Yokohama, in which are set a number of historic buildings from across Japan. There are a pond, small rivers, a profusion of flowers and wonderful scrolling trails. The garden, built by Hara Sankei, was opened to the public in 1904. Among the historic buildings in the park are the elegant residence of a daimyo (feudal lord), several teahouses, and the main hall and three storied pagoda of Tomyo-ji, the abandoned temple of Kyoto.

We then visit the Fifth Station (Kawaguchi-ko) at the Fuji Five Lakes, where, weather permitting, we can enjoy spectacular views of the snow-capped peak. A gentle stroll will allow us to identify some of the native flora of this region.

Tonight we dine together at the hotel. (Overnight Kawaguchiko) BD

Note: Our luggage will be transported separately to our hotel in Matsumoto. An overnight bag will be needed for use in Kawaguchiko.

Matsumoto – 2 nights

Day 5: Sunday 8 November, Kawaguchiko – Matsumoto
•Itchiku Kubota Art Museum
•Nakamachi Street and Kurassic-kan
•Matsumoto Rising Castle
•Japan Ukiyo-e Museum

In Kawaguchiko we will visit the Itchiku Kubota Art Museum. When the artist Itchiku Kubota was young, he encountered an example of ‘Tsujigahana’ at the Tokyo National Museum. ‘Tsujigahana’ was a technique used in dying kimonos during the 15th and 16th century, an art that was later lost. Kubota-san revived the art and created a series of kimonos decorated with mountain landscapes in all four seasons and Mount Fuji. These kimonos are displayed in a breathtaking setting. The main building is a pyramid-shaped structure supported by sixteen hiba (cypress) beams more than 1,000 years old. Other parts of the museum, displaying an antique glass bead collection, are constructed of Ryukyu limestone. The museum’s unique architecture is set against a lovely garden and red pine forest.

We then focus upon Matsumoto and its surrounds for the next two days. On arrival in the town, we walk through the historic Nakamachi-dori, a street lined with white-walled traditional inns, restaurants and antique shops. Here we visit the Nakamachi Kurassic-kan, an historic sake brewery with black-beamed interiors and traditional plaster-work outside. We cross the river to walk along the market street Nawate-dori before arriving at Matsumoto-jo, the imposing castle approached across a moat.

Matsumoto-jo was founded by the Ogasawara clan in 1504 but it was another lord, Ishikawa, who remodeled the fortress in 1593 and built the imposing black five-tier donjon that is now the oldest keep in Japan. From the top of the tower we enjoy spectacular views of the town and surrounding mountains.

We end our day with a visit to the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum, a privately owned art museum that houses the world’s largest collection of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e). The Sakai family started collecting ukiyo-e in the mid-19th century and subsequent generations built an outstanding corpus of historic and contemporary works. They established the museum in 1982. (Overnight Matsumoto) B

Day 6: Monday 9 November, Matsumoto – Kiso Valley – Matsumoto
•Narai
•Tsumago
•Magome
•Nagiso Town Museum

Today we drive out of Matsumoto and head to the Kiso Valley for a taste of how Japan looked prior to urbanisation. Developed by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu as one of the five main highways linking his capital Edo (Tokyo) with the rest of Japan, the valley contains eleven post towns and three of them, Narai, Tsumago and Magone, have been preserved as a virtual museum of the feudal past.

At Narai we see distinctive wooden buildings with window shutters and renji-goshi latticework. We shall visit the Kashira-ningyo where colourfully painted dolls and toys are still made. Nakamura House dates from the 1830s and was the home of a merchant who manufactured combs, one of the area’s specialties. You will have time to visit this and explore side streets where there are temples and shrines and the famous Kiso-no-Ohashi, an arched wooden bridge that crosses the Narai-gawa.

As we follow the valley we’ll enjoy features of the Nakasendo route, including Kiso Fukushima, the location of a major barrier, but today the gateway to the sacred mountain of Ontake.

Tsumago was a ghost town 30 years ago, with its traditional Edo-era houses on the point of collapse. Its restoration sparked the idea of cultural preservation in Japan. The pedestrian-only street is similar to that once encountered by lords and their samurai centuries ago. The highlight of Tsumago is Okuya Kyodokan, a folk museum inside a designated post inn, where the daimyo’s (feudal lord) retinue rested. On the opposite side of the street the Kyu-honjin is where the daimyo used to stay.

Our third village stop is Magome, which means ‘horse-basket’, because this is where travellers were forced to leave their horses before tackling the mountainous roads ahead.

Our final visit for the day is to the Nagiso Town Museum. Opened in 1995, the museum has three divisions: Tsumago Post Town Honjin, a sub-honjin, and a history museum. (A honjin is a temporary residence for a lord or dignitary to stay in when travelling to and from the shogunate capital of Edo.) The present building of the subhonjin was built in 1878 utilising Japanese cypress throughout, a type of wood proscribed for ordinary construction during the Edo period (1600-1868). The History Museum contains historical materials of Nagiso Town and history of the trust organisation dedicated to the preservation of historic towns, villages, and neighbourhoods. From here we return to Matsumoto, where you can explore the city on your own and enjoy dinner at a traditional restaurant. (Overnight Matsumoto) B

Kanazawa – 1 night

Day 7: Tuesday 10 November, Matsumoto – Kanazawa
•Shinkansen Superexpress train to Kanazawa
•Nomura-ke (restored samurai residence & house garden)
•Ishikawa-ken History Museum
•Higashi-Chayamachi District

This morning we travel by coach to Nagano, where we board the new Shinkansen Superexpress train to Kanazawa, considered one Japan’s best-preserved Edo-period cities. The Japanese visit Kanazawa in droves but perhaps because of its remote location and very cold winters few foreigners make the journey to experience its rich cultural legacies.

The feudal atmosphere of Kanazawa still lingers in the Nagamachi district, where old houses of the Nagamachi Samurai line the streets that once belonged to Kaga Clan Samurais. The T-shaped and L-shaped alleys are distinct characteristics of the feudal town, and the mud doors and gates of the houses remain the same as they were 400 years ago. The houses with their samurai windows (bushimado) and mud walls under the yellow Kobaita wooden roofs, which were protected from snow by straw mats (komo), evoke a bygone era.

During the Edo Period (1603-1867), the scale and dispensation of land to samurai families who lived in this district, and others in the city, was a fairly accurate indicator of rank. One of the larger Nagamachi estates was assigned to Nomura Denbei Nobusada, a senior official in the service of the first feudal lord of the Kaga domain. The reforms that accompanied the Meiji Restoration in 1868 decimated the lifestyles of the socially privileged. The samurai, whose social class was nullified, not only had their stipends terminated, but their estates were also appropriated by the state. Consequently, the Nomura family, whose considerable land holdings dated back 12 generations, lost their home and were reduced to turning a section of the remaining part of their property over to the cultivation of fruit and vegetables. Though they were discouraged from public displays of ostentation, merchant families and those of former samurai were not prohibited from commissioning the construction of exquisite gardens.

We visit the restored residence of Nomura, displaying the lifestyle and artefacts of the era, and explore its garden which features trees that are over 400 years old. Broad, irregularly shaped stepping stones provide access to the inner garden whose attractive entrance is flanked by a Chinese maple tree with leaves that turn a brilliant red in autumn. We also visit the Ishikawa-ken History Museum that is dedicated to the history of this prefecture.

Across the Asano River is the district of Higashi-Chayamachi, Kanazawa’s most famous geisha district. Many of the tall wooden-latticed houses on the narrow streets are still used by geisha for high-class entertainment as they have done since 1820 when the area was established as a geisha quarter. You can take tea (without geisha) at Shima House for a chance to experience its refined and elegant atmosphere. This district has been designated as one of Japan’s cultural assets. (Overnight Kanazawa) B

Note: Our luggage will be transported directly from Matsumoto to our hotel in Kyoto. An overnight bag will be needed for use in Kanazawa.

Kyoto – 3 nights

Day 8: Wednesday 11 November, Kanazawa – Kyoto
•Kanazawa Castle (exterior)
•Kenroku-en, Kanazawa
•Tea Ceremony at Kenroku-en
•Ishikawa Prefectural Museum for Traditional Products and Crafts
•Train from Kanazawa to Kyoto

Our first destination this morning is Kanazawa Castle, the seat of power of the local Maeda clan, hereditary feudal lords (daimyo) of the Kaga province from 1583. Burnt down on a number of occasions, only the superb Ishikawa Gate and the Sanjikken Nagaya samurai dwelling survive from the original construction.

Kenroku-en is Kanazawa’s prime attraction and one of the three most famous gardens in Japan, along with Koraku-en (Okayama) and Kairaku-en (Mito). Kenroku-en was once the outer garden of Kanazawa Castle and there has been a garden on the site since the late 1600s. The original garden, begun by the fifth Maeda lord, Tsunonori Maeda, was called Renchi tei but it was almost entirely burnt out in 1759. It was restored in the 1770s and in 1822 became known as Kenroku-en, a name that means ‘the garden of six sublimities’ or, ‘a garden combining the six aspects of a perfect garden’. These six features were what the Chinese traditionally believed were necessary for the ideal garden – spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, water-courses and panoramas: all these characteristics are to be found in the 25 acres of this beautiful garden. Beside the garden is a former samurai residence where we shall partake in a traditional tea ceremony.

We also visit the Museum for Traditional Products and Crafts, which showcases the fine arts and crafts of Ishikawa, a Prefecture whose culture of fine arts and traditional crafts compares with that of Tokyo and Kyoto. Highlights of the collection include feudal daimyo utensils using the Kaga Makie technique, Kutani porcelain from Ko-kutani (Old Kutani) and Wajima lacquer-ware.

We then transfer to the train station to take the train south to Kyoto. Kyoto was the capital of Japan from the late 8th century (c.794 AD) until 1868, when the court was moved to Tokyo. It is home to 17 World Heritage Sites, 1600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines, yet much of the city centre is modern. One of the finest of its contemporary buildings is its dramatic railway station.

In the evening you may choose to make an optional visit to the Gion district of Kyoto for a glimpse of a vanishing world – home to geisha houses and traditional teahouses. Although the number of geishas has declined over the last century the area is still famous for the preservation of forms of traditional architecture and entertainment. To experience the traditional Gion, we stroll along Hanami-koji, a street lined by beautiful old buildings, including teahouses, where you may be able to glimpse a geisha apprentice. Contrary to popular belief Gion is not a red-light district, nor are geishas prostitutes. Geishas are young girls or women extensively trained as entertainers and skilled in a number of traditional Japanese arts such as classical music and dance as well as the performance of the exacting rituals of a Japanese tea ceremony. (Overnight Kyoto) B

Day 9: Thursday 12 November, Kyoto
•Kinkaku-ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion)
•Ryoan-ji (Dragon Peace Temple)
•Daitoku-ji Buddhist Complex incl. the Ryogen-in

Kyoto is notable for its extraordinary diversity of Japanese gardens, including many of the finest traditional temple gardens. Our first visit in Kyoto is to the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji). During the 15th century the Chinese Sung Dynasty exercised an enormous influence in Japan as artists, poets and Zen priests were gathered together by Yoshimitsu, the third Ashikaga shogun (1358-1409). Yoshimitsu began construction of the Golden Pavilion just before he retired in 1394, handing power to his nine-year-old son so that he could move to his estate. Little of his work remains but we can sense the character of the garden in its pond, rockwork and extensive plantings.

The pavilion at Kinkaku-ji recalls Sung period architecture but it is a recreation, having been burned down in the 1950s. The present building is an exact replica except that where Yoshimitsu proposed only to gild the ceiling of the third storey with gold; now the whole building is gilded. Yoshimitsu positioned his palace on the edge of a lake. The ground floor was a reception room for guests and departure point for leisure boating, the first storey was for philosophical discussions and panoramic views of the lake while the upper floor acted as a refuge for Yoshimitsu and was used for tea ceremonies. The size of the gardens is increased visually by the water’s convoluted edge, the use of rocks and clipped trees and by visually ‘borrowing’ a distant view of Mt Kinugasa that creates a sense of gradation between foreground, middleground and deep distance.

We next visit Ryoan-ji – the Dragon Peace Temple. No other garden in the world is so simple, elegant and refined. The garden comprises 15 rocks in a sea of raked gravel surrounded by a compacted mud wall coated in oil that is in itself a national treasure. The garden dates from 1500 as part of a temple of the Renzai sect of Zen Buddhism. The temple burned but was reconstructed in its original form. The garden constitutes the supreme example of a dry garden where gravel and rock symbolise plant and water elements. Indeed, apart from the moss on the rocks, no other plants grow in it. The meaning of the garden remains unknown. It might symbolise islands in a sea, mountains seen through clouds or tigers and cubs crossing a river, but this doesn’t matter since this is a garden to encourage contemplation, the enclosing wall separating the visitor from the world outside, and the verandah creating a horizontal boundary.

We conclude the day with a visit to Daitoku-ji, a large complex of Zen temples with prayer halls, religious structures and 23 sub-temples with some of the most exquisite gardens in Kyoto, some quite small, including raked gravel gardens and, in the Daisen-in, one of the most celebrated small rock gardens in Japan. The Japanese consider Daitoku-ji one of the most privileged places to study and it is associated with many of Japan’s most famous priests. Unlike many of the larger public Buddhist temples of earlier sects, the Rinzai sect monasteries were intimate, inward looking and remained isolated from the outside world.

The temple received imperial patronage and thus grew out from its centre in an organic way. A transition occurred as the complex expanded from a formal centre to semiformal and informal precincts. The central north-south walkway is most formal with wide paths to accommodate processions and ceremonies, while to the side are sub-temples with gates. As you walk through one of these gates you immediately come upon a less formal world with narrow paths, turns and walkways. The temple site contains a number of notable gardens including Daisen-in, Koto-in, Koho-an, Hogo and Ryogen-in. (Overnight Kyoto) B

Day 10: Friday 13 November, Kyoto
•Enko-ji
•Shisen-do
•Lunch at the Beaux Sejours, Grand Prince Hotel
•Renge-ji

Today we will visit a number of Kyoto’s great gardens. Our first visit for the day is to Enko-ji, located in northern Kyoto. A temple of the Rinzai Zen Sect, this temple was founded in 1601 and is particularly famous for the autumn colours of the maple trees in its beautiful garden. Visitors view the garden from the temple.

The intimate gardens of Shisen-do are considered masterworks of Japanese gardens. Its street walls mask the tranquillity and beauty to be found within. Raked sand, clipped azaleas and the tree covered hillsides of Higashiyama form the main components of this garden designed by Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672). Clipped azaleas give way to natural vegetation beyond the garden boundary but it is the close harmony between the indoor spaces of the pavilion and the garden beyond that is most striking. The verandah offers a transition between its dark interior and the light-filled garden.

Following lunch at the Grand Prince Hotel’s Beaux Sejours restaurant, we visit Renge-ji. The temple is known for its garden, which reflects the beauty of seasonal change. Autumn when the maple leaves change colour, is the best season to visit. Capturing the essence of Japanese gardens, it includes a central pond surrounded by plantings linking to the hillside beyond. Stones, bridge and plantings are all reflected on the water-surface, giving a sense of spaciousness. (Overnight Kyoto) BL

Nara – 1 night

Day 11: Saturday 14 November, Kyoto – Nara
•Isui-en Garden
•Yoshiki-en Garden
•Todai-ji Temple
•Kofuku-ji Temple
•Traditional Japanese bath (optional)

We leave Kyoto by coach for the ancient Japanese city of Nara, the national capital prior to Kyoto. During this period Buddhism became firmly established in Japan under the patronage of nobles who sponsored the buildings and works of art that we shall visit.

Our first destination is to the small Isui-en, a traditional Japanese garden notable for its extensive use of moss and its exquisite tea pavilion. This garden is a kaiyushiki teien (strolling) style design that allows the visitor to easily walk through the garden and view it from many different angles. Next door is Yoshiki-en, another historic garden names after the Yoshikigawa River that flows between the two gardens. Here we find three gardens – a pond garden, a moss garden and a tea ceremony garden.

After time at leisure for lunch we visit the impressive Todai-ji, founded in 745 by Emperor Shomu. Although rebuilt following a fire in 1709 to two-thirds of its original size it nevertheless remains the largest timber building in the world. Two seven-metre tall guardian gods flank the entrance, (known as the nandai-mon), to the great Buddha Hall, the Daibutsu-den, which houses the 15-metre-tall bronze statue of the great Buddha. The original casting was completed in 752, when an Indian priest stood on a special platform and symbolically opened its eyes by painting on the Buddha’s eyes with a huge brush. This ceremony was performed before the then retired Emperor Shomu, his wife Komio and the reigning Empress Kogen, together with ambassadors from China, India and Persia.

The traditional Japanese-style inn we are staying in tonight provides open-air communal baths using hot spring water and affords a wonderful view of Kofuku-ji Temple’s five-storey pagoda, which is illuminated at night. Tonight we dine in a traditional style at the Ryokan Asukasou, which serves Japanese kaiseki dishes. (Overnight Nara) BD

Note: We will leave our main luggage at the hotel in Kyoto during our 1 night stay in Nara. An overnight bag will be needed for use in Nara

Kyoto – 3 nights

Day 12: Sunday 15 November, Nara – Kyoto
•Shin-Yakushi-ji
•Tointeien Garden
•Kofuku-ji Temple
•Horyu-ji

Shin-Yakushi-ji is a Buddhist temple built in the 19th year of the Tempyo era (747) by Empress Komio as an offering of thanksgiving when Emperor Shomu recovered from an eye disease. It now constitutes a single hall enshrining a powerful image of Yakushi Nyorai, the Healing Buddha, surrounded by clay sculptures of 12 guardians called Juni Shinsho, the Yakushi Nyorai’s protective warriors. In Japanese sculpture and art, the warriors are almost always grouped in a protective circle around the Yakushi Nyorai; they are rarely depicted as single figures. Many say they represent the 12 vows of Yakushi; others believe the 12 were present when the historical Buddha introduced the ‘Healing Sutra’; others claim that they offer protection during the 12 daylight hours, or that they represent the 12 months and 12 cosmic directions, or the 12 animals of the 12-year Chinese zodiac.

We then transfer Tointeien, a strolling garden on the Nara Palace Site. The area was excavated in 1967 and completely reconstructed in preparation for being opened to the public in 1998. It’s layout and structures reflect both Chinese and Japanese styles.

A short distance away is Kofuku-ji, founded in 669. This complex contains a five-storey pagoda, a fine collection of Buddhist statues in the kokuhokan (National Treasure Building) and a 15th-century hall to the north of the pagoda. The kokahokan is a treasure trove of early Buddhist statues and although it is not large, each piece has been carefully chosen as a masterpiece of its style and period.

The grounds of Horyu-ji house the world’s oldest surviving wooden structures, dating from the Asuka Period (mid-6th-beginning of 8th century AD). Throughout the 187,000-square-metre grounds are irreplaceable cultural treasures, bequeathed across the centuries and continuing to preserve the essence of eras spanning the entire journey through Japanese history since the 7th century. Horyu-ji contains over 2300 important cultural and historical structures and articles, including nearly 190 that have been designated as National Treasures or important Cultural Properties. In 1993 Horyu-ji was selected by UNESCO as part of the World Heritage as a unique storehouse of world Buddhist culture. Following this visit we transfer by coach to Kyoto. (Overnight Kyoto) B

Day 13: Monday 16 November, Kyoto
•Tenryu-ji
•Nanzen-ji
•Philosopher’s Path
•Ginkaku-ji (Temple of the Silver Pavilion)

We first visit the Tenryu-ji, which dates from the period of shogun Ashikaga Takauji (1339). He commissioned the priest Muso Kokushi – one of Japan’s best known garden designers, who also designed the moss garden at Saiho-ji – to create this garden. Kokushi’s work modified an estate of Emperor Gosaga from 1270. He changed its form to include an Heian-style pond garden with popular, contemporary Chinese aspects. These included most notably a group of seven vertical rocks near the rear shore of its pond. These contrast markedly with Japanese rock work that takes a more horizontal form. This is one of the earliest gardens to show shakkei, the incorporation of borrowed landscape into a garden’s design.

Nanzen-ji is one of the most famous Rinzai Zen temples in Japan. It was founded in 1291 by Emperor Kameyama, and was rebuilt several times after devastating fires. At the entrance to the complex one passes through the huge Imperial gate, built in 1628 by Todo Takatora, and into the complex with its series of sub-temples. We will see the hojo, or abbot’s quarters, which is notable for both it’s beautiful golden screen paintings and the tranquil sand and rock garden. We will also explore the sub-temple Konchi-in which was added to the complex in 1605.

We stroll along the charming Philosophers Way – a footpath than follows a canal lines with cherry trees. It is named for Nishida Kitaro, one of Japan’s most famous philosophers, who walked this route to Kyoto University each day.

The Philosopher’s Path ends at Ginkaku-ji. Originally constructed as the retirement villa of the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1435-1490), the Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion) became a Zen temple upon his death. The garden is complex, comprising two distinct sections, a pond area with a composition of rocks and plants, and a sand garden with a truncated cone – the Moon-Viewing Height – suggesting Mt Fuji; and a horizontal mound – the Sea of Silver Sand – named for its appearance by moonlight. An educational display at the garden contains good moss and weed moss to allow you to tell the difference. (Overnight Kyoto) B

Day 14: Tuesday 17 November, Kyoto
•Heian Shrine
•Tofuku-ji
•Afternoon at leisure

We begin the day with a visit to one of the newest religious sites in Kyoto, the Heian Shrine, which boasts the largest torii (sacred gate) in Japan and lovely gardens. The shrine was built in 1896 to commemorate the city’s 1,100th anniversary and to honour its founder, Emperor Kammu and also to celebrate the culture and architecture of the city’s Heian-past. It is constructed on the site of the original Heian Hall of State but is a smaller and somewhat imperfect recreation of this earlier building. Four gardens surround the main shrine buildings on the south, west, middle and east, covering an area of approximately 33,000 square metres. The gardens are designated as a national scenic spot representative of Meiji-era (1868-1912) garden design.

We then visit the superb Tofuku-ji Hojo, a garden designed in 1939 by Shigemori Mirei. This will be familiar to many who have read books on Japanese gardens for it combines 20th-century design with elements from Japanese tradition. Mirei implements subtle, restrained design themes such as chequer-boards of stone in moss to allow the natural form and colour of maples on the surrounding hills to make full impact.

The afternoon is at leisure to further this city’s rich culture. (Overnight Kyoto) B

Matsue – 1 night

Day 15: Wednesday 18 November, Kyoto – Okayama – Matsue
•Kouraku-en
•Adachi Museum of Art
•Farewell Dinner at a Local Restaurant

Today we depart Kyoto and travel by train to Okayama where we visit another of the country’s so-called ‘Three Great Gardens of Japan’, Kouraku-en. This garden dates from the Edo period when the daimyo (feudal lord) Ikeda Tsunamasa ordered its construction in 1687. Completed in 1700, it has retained its overall appearance with only a few minor changes made over the centuries. The garden was used for entertaining guests and also as a retreat for the daimyo.

In the afternoon we travel by train to Matsue, where we shall visit the Adachi Museum of Art, located in the rural landscape of the Sinmane region. This is a contemporary art museum set within a large garden, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful gardens in Japan. The museum was founded by Adachi Zenko who felt a strong resonance between the sublime sensibility of the Japanese-style garden and the paintings of Yokoyama Taikan whose work he collected. This is a contemplation garden which visitors observe from various carefully designed points within the museum. Each season reveals itself through different aspects of the garden, and during our visit we can expect the hills that form the backdrop to the vista before us to be a blaze of autumnal colour while vivid reds enliven the foliage of the garden. After checking in to our hotel, we shall enjoy a farewell dinner at a local restaurant. (Overnight Matsue) BD

Note: As we will be travelling by train today, our luggage will be transferred directly to the Matsue hotel.

Day 16: Thursday 19 November, Depart Matsue
•Morning Exploration of Matsue
•Transfer to Izumo Airport

This morning we explore the small regional city of Matsue. In addition to its castle, Matsue has an attractive Samurai district and also the house museum of Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first western authors to write about Japanese culture. His books that introduced Japan to the western work include Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan and a collection of legends Kwaidan Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

After lunchtime at leisure we transfer to Izumo Airport for our flights home. B

Hills and Vales of South Australia with Julie Kinney

Hills and Vales of South Australia with Julie Kinney

Gardens, Art, History and Wine

 

12–20 September 2019 (9 days)

 

HIGHLIGHTS…

From the Barossa Valley to McLaren Vale and the Adelaide Hills, explore the rich springtime offerings of South Australia’s gardens, art, produce and wine.

Travel north-east from Adelaide to the Barossa Valley stopping at Anlaby Station, the historic homestead of South Australia’s oldest Merino stud, and the estate of celebrated cook and author Maggie Beer. Visit colonial towns where established vineyards and architecture form the iconic image of this wine region, and delight in local produce at renowned farms.

In the Adelaide Hills, home of verdant and creative gardens, enjoy intimate tours of private gardens and discover herb and flower planting practices at the farm of skincare brand Jurlique.

In McLaren Vale, indulge in prestigious restaurants and wineries scattered throughout this Mediterranean-like valley.

 

AT A GLANCE:

• Discover the iconic historic houses, gardens and estates of the Barossa Valley
• Explore select private gardens of the Adelaide Hills, including the imaginative property Tickle Tank, a water tank turned into a home and garden
• Learn more about flower and herb harvesting on a tour of the Jurlique farm
• Admire sweeping landscapes of vineyards, wheat fields and orchards, awash with springtime colour
• Savour South Australia’s unique produce and wines, and enjoy a cooking demonstration at Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop

 

ITINERARY

Thursday 12 September 2019 / Depart Adelaide – Barossa Valley

Meet Julie and fellow travellers at the Mayfair Hotel (45 King William Street, Adelaide) at 09:30am. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements, including additional nights’ accommodation before and after the tour.

Depart Adelaide for Al-Ru Farm in Sampson Flat for lunch and a tour of its generous gardens, containing sweeping lawns, ponds, arbours, rose gardens and a lake in a rural setting. In the afternoon, travel to Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop, founded by pre-eminent cook and writer Maggie Beer. Enjoy a private cooking demonstration using some of Beer’s signature ingredients including verjuice (unripe grape juice) and vino cotto (cooked grape must). Then, continue to Rowland Flat and check in to the hotel. Dinner is at a local restaurant. (LD)

 

Fri 13 Sep / Barossa Valley

This morning enjoy a tour of Anlaby Station, one of Australia’s great homesteads and one of the first grand rural properties of South Australia, located in the Barossa Valley region. It contains a four-hectare garden which is home to a variety of National Trust heritage trees and plants. Enjoy a tour of the garden, followed by lunch. After lunch, depart for Yalumba Winery, a prominent family-owned business which was founded in 1849 by Samuel Smith. Here, enjoy a wander around the lush gardens contained within its historical grounds.

We continue to Seppeltsfield for a tour of the estate, including the Jam Factory and Vasse Virgin, discovering some of the estate’s produce along the way. Arrive back at the hotel in the late afternoon for some time at leisure, followed by dinner at Seppeltsfield’s FINO Restaurant. (BLD)

 

Sat 14 Sep / Barossa Valley

After breakfast, travel to Angaston to visit the Vinters famers market a great place to view and taste the local produce of the Barossa Valley. Afterwards we will have some free time for lunch and to explore Angaston, one of the earliest established towns in the Barossa Valley. After lunch we, continue to the Barossa Sculpture Park located at Mengler’s Hill in the Barossa Ranges to view the abstract sculptures carved in local marble and granite. The site offers stunning views of the Barossa Valley. Return to the hotel for some time at leisure followed by dinner at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

Sun 15 Sep / Barossa Valley – Hahndorf

Check out of the hotel in the morning and travel to Learbrook for a tour of the garden of horticulturalist Dr Margaret Burrell. Margaret is a close acquaintance of your tour leader, Julie Kinney. Next, visit Marble Hill House, a private estate which was the Vice-Regal summer residence of the Governor of South Australia between 1880 and 1955. Enjoy light lunch at Marble Hill House, before travelling to Hahndorf, first settled in the 19th century by Lutheran immigrants and today maintaining the unique history of being the oldest German settlement in Australia. On arrival in Hahndorf there will be a guided coach tour of the town before checking into the hotel. Dinner is at a local restaurant. (BLD)

 

Mon 16 Sep / Hahndorf

Begin the day with a tour of the delightful private garden of Sheringa. Featuring a rustic arch formed by the limbs of an old oak tree, the garden is adorned with seasonal plants including hellebores, crocus, cyclamen, clematis, aster, liliums and dahlias. Continue to the small town of Verdun located in the Adelaide Hills for lunch. After lunch, visit Kidman Flower Co, a family-owned native foliage and flower farm in the heart of the Adelaide Hills, for a tour and a hands-on flower-arranging demonstration, followed by afternoon tea. The evening is at leisure. (BL)

 

Tue 17 Sep / Hahndorf

This morning visit the The Cedars, the historic house and working studio of Australian landscape artist Sir Hans Heysen. The gracious old home is surrounded by a rambling cottage garden. Continue to delightful Tickle Tank, the home and garden of artist and gardener Irene Pearce, to discover the home constructed from concrete water tanks and adorned with mosaics. The quirky 450-square-metre garden features native grasses, herbs, roses and fruit trees. After a light lunch in the garden, return to the hotel for an afternoon and evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Wed 18 Sep / Hahndorf – McLaren Vale

Check out of the hotel for an exploration of the biodynamic Jurlique Farm, the home of one of Australia’s most prominent skin care brands. A variety of herbs, plants and flowers are grown using biodynamic practices of compost production and soil enrichment to create ingredients for their line of natural skin care products. In the afternoon travel to Coriole Vineyards for a short walk through the estate’s unique, multi-level Australian cottage garden, followed by lunch on the veranda. Check in to the hotel in the afternoon. The evening is at leisure. (BL)

 

Thu 19 Sep / McLaren Vale

Travel to Sophie’s Patch, a garden in Mt Barker owned by Sophie Thomson, a presenter on ABC TV’s Gardening Australia. Enjoy a private tour of the garden in this 1.2-hectare property, which includes an organic vegetable patch and a large number of fruit and nut trees. En route stop at historic Strathalbyn for a walk through the ‘Soldiers Garden’ situated in the middle of this small Australian town followed by lunch. In the afternoon, visit Boat’s End for a tour of this drought-tolerant garden near the mouth of the Murray River, displaying a variety of Australian native and non-native plants that sustain themselves within the natural weather patterns of the area. Return to the hotel in the late afternoon followed by an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Fri 20 Sep / McLaren Vale – Adelaide – Depart Adelaide

Check out of the hotel and travel to Denella Downs for a private tour of the gardens within this eight-hectare property. The garden contains forest pansies, magnolias, camellias, weeping Japanese maples and roses, and scattered around the garden is old farm equipment, which the owner loves to collect. Next, travel to the renowned d’Arenberg winery for a tour of the iconic d’Arenberg cube and a special farewell lunch with Julie and fellow travellers. After lunch, transfer to Adelaide Airport for flights departing from 16:00, or continue to the Adelaide CBD (transfer included in tour price), where tour arrangements conclude.

Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements, including any additional nights’ accommodation, either before or after the tour. (BL)

 

Note: At time of publication (November 2018), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than two to three months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

Ionian Odyssey

Ionian Odyssey – Landscapes, Literature and Gardens of the Ionian Islands with Trisha Dixon

 

09–21 June 2019 (13 days)

 

HIGHLIGHTS…

Embark on a journey with landscape photographer Trisha Dixon to the Ionian islands of Kefalonia, Ithaca, Paxos and Corfu, which abound with elegant gardens, stunning landscapes, historic castles and aristocratic villas.

In Kefalonia, visit a selection of private gardens and admire the crumbling remains of Venetian castles. On Ithaca, see the landscapes that inspired Homer and his modern Greek successor, the poet Constantine Cavafy.

Then continue to Corfu, Venice’s Mediaeval stronghold against the Ottomans. Later, British dominion added another layer to the local culture, and the result is an island that boasts exquisite villas, charming landscape gardens and impressive Venetian fortresses. Visit a selection of public and private gardens and spend time exploring the natural wilderness of Paxos.

 

AT A GLANCE:

• Explore Kefalonia, an island of lush forests and dramatic cliffs, and Ithaca, home of Odysseus and muse of Cavafy
• Spend five days on Corfu, visiting private gardens, stunning villas and proud fortresses from the island’s period under Venetian rule
• Visit Paxos, a true hidden gem of the Ionian Sea
• Immerse yourself in Ionian culture in the islands’ winding lanes, walled gardens and relaxed tavernas serving fresh seafood cuisine

 

ITINERARY

Saturday 08 June 2019 / Depart Australia/New Zealand

Depart Australia or New Zealand in the evening on suggested Qatar Airways flights to Athens via Doha. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements.

 

Sat 09 Jun / Arrive Athens

Arrive in Athens in the early afternoon on suggested flights and make your way to the hotel for check-in. At 17:30 join Trisha and fellow travellers for a welcome briefing followed by a special welcome dinner. (D)

 

Mon 10 Jun / Athens – Kefalonia

In the morning, check out of the hotel and transfer to Athens Airport for a flight to Kefalonia (flight included in tour price).
On arrival in Kefalonia, the largest of the Ionian Islands, transfer to the hotel in Fiskardo, our base for the next three nights. Enjoy some time at leisure before dinner. (BD)

 

Tue 11 Jun / Kefalonia

Travel south to the capital city of Kefalonia, Argostoli, set alongside a deep bay. Visit the Argostoli Botanical Garden, which presents wild and endemic species of the Ionian Islands in a natural setting. After lunch, discover the Monastery of St Andreas, founded during the Byzantine era, and visit its ecclesiastical museum including a large collection of frescos and panel icons. Continue to the Venetian Castle of Saint George standing on a hilltop. Originally built by the Byzantines in the 12th century and largely improved by the Venetians in later centuries, the castle was the capital of Kefalonia until 1757, before it was transferred to present-day Argostoli.  (BL)

 

Wed 12 Jun / Kefalonia (Ithaca)

Today, journey by ferry to the island of Ithaca, steeped in myth and history. Famous as the home of Odysseus, the island of Ithaca – and particularly the journey to the island as a metaphor for the struggles of life – inspired Homer in the 8th century BC and his modern Greek successor, the early 20th century poet Constantine Cavafy who is considered to have revived the tradition of Greek poetry.
Explore the island, visiting the Homeric sites and enjoying astonishing scenery such as beautiful beaches with clear blue water, lush green valleys and quaint mountain villages. Return to Kefalonia in the afternoon. (BL)

 

Thu 13 Jun / Kefalonia

This morning, visit the picturesque port of Fiskardo with two-storey houses painted in traditional pastel colours with dark red tiled rooftops. After lunch at a local restaurant, discover Dafnoudi Cove, a small hidden rocky beach with crystal clear waters.  (BL)

 

Fri 14 Jun / Kefalonia – Paxos

Check out of the hotel in the early morning and transfer to Kefalonia Airport for a flight to Corfu (flight included in tour price). On arrival in Corfu, transfer by boat to the untamed island of Paxos, covered in tall olive trees. Arrive at the hotel and enjoy some time at leisure. Dinner tonight is at the hotel. (BD)

 

Sat 15 Jun / Paxos

Today, explore the small island of Paxos by private boat and discover this true hidden gem of the Ionian Sea, stopping at different coves to swim in its clear water. Lunch is on board.
Continue to the tiny neighbouring island of Antipaxos, so named because it lies ‘opposite Paxos’. Return to Paxos port in the late afternoon. (BL)

 

Sun 16 Jun / Paxos – Corfu

Check out of the hotel and visit Paxos Museum, located in the charming port town of Gaios and learn about the history of the island. Then, enjoy stunning views of the island during an orientation tour by coach, stopping along the way in picturesque villages and traditional olive presses. In the afternoon, transfer by boat to Corfu and check in to the hotel, our base for the next five nights. Dinner tonight is at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

Mon 17 Jun / Corfu

This morning, discover the Old Town of Corfu. Located in a strategic position at the entrance of the Adriatic Sea, the Old Town was built between two ancient fortresses and remains a fine example of Venetian and Byzantine art with elegant mansions and imposing buildings.
Then, depart for Gastouri and enjoy a private garden visit followed by lunch. Here, our host, a garden writer, will reveal the secrets of gardening in a Mediterranean climate. Enjoy some time at leisure to continue your exploration of the extensive property at your own pace. (BL)

 

Tue 18 Jun / Corfu

Travel to the north of the island and visit a private garden before enjoying lunch in a traditional beachside taverna near Kalami. In the afternoon, enjoy some time at leisure to swim at Kalami Beach and see the house of mid-20th century British expatriate authors Gerald and Lawrence Durrell. Return to Corfu town in the late afternoon. (BL)

 

Wed 19 Jun / Corfu

This morning, visit a selection of private gardens before travelling to Pelekas. In Pelekas, discover another lovely property on an exclusive garden tour by our friendly local host before enjoying some sunset drinks at her home. Dinner tonight is at a local taverna. (BD)

 

Thu 20 Jun / Corfu

Discover Mon Repos Palace standing on Analipsis Hill, where the ancient town of Corfu was located. Built in 1826 by the British Commissioner Frederic Adams, this grand palace is surrounded by a magnificent garden of approximately 100 hectares and was the birthplace of Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh – who is still affectionately known in his adopted British homeland as ‘Phil the Greek’. Then, travel south to the village of Boukari and celebrate the conclusion of the tour with a special farewell lunch with Trisha and fellow travellers. After some time at leisure in Boukari, return to Corfu town. (BL)

 

Fri 21 Jun / Depart Corfu

Tour arrangements conclude after breakfast. Make your way to Corfu Airport for suggested morning flights to Athens, connecting with suggested Qatar Airways flights to Australia or New Zealand via Doha. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements, including any additional nights’ accommodation, either before or after the tour. (B)

 

Note: At time of publication (October 2018), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than two to three months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

Landscapes of the NSW South Coast with Trisha Dixon

Landscapes of the NSW South Coast with Trisha Dixon

From Sydney to Merimbula

 

01–08 April 2019 (8 days)

 

HIGHLIGHTS…

 

Travel along the picturesque New South Wales South Coast from Sydney to Merimbula with garden writer and landscape photographer Trisha Dixon to discover the diverse gardens, landscapes and endemic species of this less-trodden part of the New South Wales coastline.

Explore the rich natural beauty of the South Coast while visiting select private gardens, artists’ studios and gourmet providores. Discover endemic and native plants at the exceptional Bodalla Estate on Horse Island and the superb Thubbul sculpture garden in Murrah Inlet and travel along the Mimosa Rocks coastline.
Near Eden, visit the thriving port of Boyd Town and walk along deserted beaches of Twofold Bay, following the ancient path of the Yuin people during their annual migration.

 

AT A GLANCE:

• Visit leading art galleries, wineries and outstanding gardens of the New South Wales South Coast
• Learn more about endemic and native plants while visiting the outstanding Bodalla Estate on Horse Island
• Explore exceptional private gardens including Thubbul sculpture garden, overlooking the ocean
• Enjoy a fine gourmet dinner at Rick Stein restaurant at Bannisters in Mollymook
• Travel south through the Mimosa Rocks National Park to the lovely beaches of Twofold Bay near Eden

 

ITINERARY

 

Monday 01 April 2019 / Depart Sydney

At 10:00 meet Trisha and fellow travellers at the Novotel Darling Square (17 Little Pier Street in Darling Harbour) and transfer to the Royal National Park. Established in 1879 as the world’s second-oldest national park, the Royal National Park is a natural haven with wetlands, eucalyptus forests, grassy woodlands, rainforests, scenic landscapes and sandstone cliffs.
Enjoy a scenic coastal drive along the Grand Pacific Highway to Kiama. Visit this picturesque harbour town and the famous blowhole that can spray water up to 25 metres in the air. The name of the town is derived from the Wadi Wadi word ‘Kiarama’ meaning ‘place where the sea makes a noise’. Tonight, enjoy a special welcome dinner with Trisha and fellow travellers.(D)

 

Tue 02 Apr / Kiama – Mollymook

This morning, travel to the delightful village of Berry and visit this historic country town with heritage buildings.
Then, continue to Bundanon Trust, overlooking the Shoalhaven River. This important art centre hosts over 4,000 items with more than 2,500 works by the Australian painter Arthur Boyd and the Boyd family dynasty, also including contemporary works by various artists-in-residence. Explore the art collection, and visit Arthur Boyd’s homestead and studio. Travel south to Mollymook, arriving in the late afternoon. Check in to the hotel, our base for the next three nights.
(BL)

 

Wed 03 Apr / Mollymook

Discover the charming historic town of Milton and continue to Cupitt’s Winery nearby, located in the Milton Hills with scenic views over the Budawang Ranges. Enjoy a special wine tasting to appreciate the particular characteristics of the region’s fine wine, followed by lunch. In the afternoon, visit a selection of private gardens before returning to Mollymook (BL)

 

Thu 04 Apr / Mollymook

This morning, visit a selection of gardens and artists’ studios and galleries near Mollymook.
Return to the hotel and enjoy an afternoon at leisure to appreciate the region’s beautiful beaches.
Dinner tonight is at the acclaimed Rick Stein at Bannisters restaurant, with dramatic cliff-top views over the South Coast shoreline. (BD)

 

Fri 05 Apr / Mollymook – Bermagui

Check out of the hotel and travel to Horse Island to discover the outstanding Bodalla Estate. From its origin as the property of 19th century pastoralist and industrialist Thomas Sutcliffe Mort to its present ownership by Trevor and Christina Kennedy, learn about this exceptional garden landscaped exclusively with native and endemic plants, and its elegant colonial era buildings. After lunch, enjoy a private garden visit near Tilba. Continue to Bermagui and arrive at the hotel in the late afternoon. (BL)

 

Sat 06 Apr / Bermagui

This morning, visit the superb Thubbul sculpture garden, home of well-known architect Philip Cox. Built in a series of pavilions connected by a walkway, this splendid sculpture garden is surrounded by an English-style garden and hectares of spotted gums overlooking the ocean and Murrah Inlet. After lunch at a local restaurant, travel through the Mimosa Rocks National Park and visit some private properties along the coastline before returning to Bermagui.
(BL)

 

Sun 07 Apr / Bermagui – Merimbula

Check out of the hotel and travel south to the thriving port of Boyd Town near Eden. Then, celebrate the conclusion of the tour with a special farewell lunch with Trisha and fellow travellers. Enjoy an afternoon walk along the deserted beaches of Twofold Bay following the Bundian Way, an ancient path once used by the Yuin Indigenous people during their annual migration to the high country. In the late afternoon, continue to Merimbula for the last night of the tour. (BL)

 

Mon 08 Apr / Depart Merimbula

Tour arrangements conclude after breakfast.

If you are returning home today, we suggest flights from Merimbula airport to either Sydney or Melbourne. Please speak to the hotel reception for a taxi to the airport nearby.
Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements, including any additional nights’ accommodation, either before or after the tour.
(B)

 

Note: At time of publication (November 2018), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than two to three months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

 

 

Japanese Gardens, Art and Architecture with Genevieve Jacobs

Japanese Gardens, Art and Architecture with Genevieve Jacobs

 

HIGHLIGHTS…

 

Discover the timeless beauty of Japanese autumn gardens and contemporary art and architecture in the company of garden writer and Japanophile Genevieve Jacobs.

While Japan is renowned for its traditional garden culture, in recent decades the country has embraced the contemporary in striking art and architecture, often set in magnificent man-made spaces and dramatic natural environments.

From Tokyo to Kyoto, visit Japan’s most famous gardens, as well as ground-breaking art and architecture, including tranquil Takayama, Shinto shrines on Miyajima Island, landscape gardens in Kanazawa and contemporary art museums in Kyoto.

 

AT A GLANCE:

 

• Discover Tokyo’s fascinating combination of traditional landscape gardens and contemporary art museums
• Enjoy a change of pace in the unspoiled Edo era mountain town of Takayama and the enigmatic Shirakawa Valley
• Explore Hiroshima and Miyajima Island, known as the ‘Shrine Island’
• Visit some of Japan’s most famous landscape gardens, such as Kanazawa’s Kenroku-en Garden and Okayama’s Kōraku-en Garden
• In the former imperial capital of Kyoto, see Zen Buddhist temples, Shinto gardens and the Miho Museum of Contemporary Art
• Journey through picturesque countryside and savour Japan’s unique and refined cuisine

 

ITINERARY

 

Monday 04 November 2019 / Australia / New Zealand – Tokyo

 

Depart Australia or New Zealand in the morning on suggested Japan Airlines to Tokyo Narita Airport. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements.
Arrive in Tokyo Narita Airport on suggested flights in time for a group transfer to the hotel at 18:30.

For those arriving on other flights, transfer to the hotel on shuttle limousine (included in tour price).

 

Tue 05 Nov / Tokyo

This morning, join Genevieve and fellow travellers for a welcome breakfast and briefing.

Visit the Imperial Palace East Gardens, part of the inner palace. The gardens are the former site of Edo Castle’s innermost circles of defence: the honmaru (main circle) and ninomaru (secondary circle).

Continue to Tokyo’s largest and most famous Shinto shrine, Meiji Jingu. Located in an evergreen forest of approximately 70 hectares in the middle of Tokyo, the shrine is dedicated to the divine souls of Emperor Meiji and his wife, Empress Shoken.

Following lunch, continue to the Mori Art Museum, a contemporary art museum founded by real estate developer Minoru Mori. The museum is located on the 52nd and 53rd floors of the Mori Tower, offering spectacular views from the panoramic observation deck. Dinner is at a local restaurant. (BLD)

 

 

Wed 06 Nov / Tokyo

In the morning, explore the large public Ueno park situated in central Tokyo. The park grounds were originally part of Kaneiji Temple, a family temple of the ruling Tokugawa clan during the Edo period. Visit Tokyo National Museum located within the park, housing the largest collection of national treasures and important cultural items in the country.

After lunch, visit Koishikawa Kōraku-en Garden, one of Tokyo’s oldest Japanese gardens. This beautiful Japanese landscape garden represents famous Japanese and Chinese scenes in miniature, dating from the early Edo period.  Dinner tonight is at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

 

Thu 07 Nov / Tokyo – Takayama

Check out of the hotel in the early morning in advance of a high-speed train trip from Tokyo to Takayama (included in tour price).

On arrival, enjoy a walking tour of Takayama’s beautifully preserved old town. Many of the buildings and streets date back to the Edo period, with some open to visit, providing a glimpse behind the façade into the former living quarters of local merchants. Dinner is at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

 

Fri 08 Nov / Takayama

Travel to the mountainous region of Shokawa Valley and discover the traditional town of Shirakawa-go, much celebrated for its historic Minka houses. Remote and isolated from the rest of the world for hundreds of years, the region developed a specific architectural style with exceptionally strong thatched roofs houses to support the weight of snowfalls. Return to Takayama and enjoy an afternoon at leisure to further explore the city. (B)

 

 

Sat 09 Nov / Takayama – Kanazawa

Journey to Kanazawa, a city that has retained a strong cultural identity with traditional ceramics, lacquer and kimono production. Discover the picturesque Nagamachi district, formerly home to the region’s samurai, and continue to Omicho fish market for lunch.

In the afternoon, visit the innovative 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art and explore emerging new work in visual arts, design, craft, fashion, architecture and film.

Continue to the Higashi Chaya district, famous for its teahouses, well preserved buildings and narrow cobbled lanes. Dinner tonight is at a local restaurant.
(BLD)

 

 

Sun 10 Nov / Kanazawa

Today, explore the Kenroku-en Garden that used to be the outer garden of the Kanazawa castle. Kenroku-en Garden (the ‘garden of six elements’) combines the six attributes of a perfect Japanese garden. This strolling-style landscape garden is considered one of Japan’s most beautiful gardens, with seasonal floral displays, ponds, streams, stone lanterns and tea houses.

The remainder of the afternoon and the evening are at leisure to continue your exploration of Kanazawa at your own pace. (B)

 

 

Mon 11 Nov / Kanazawa – Hiroshima

Check out of the hotel and transfer to Kanazawa train station for a morning train to Hiroshima (included in tour price).

On arrival in Hiroshima, visit the Peace Memorial Park, created in memory of 06 August 1945 when the first atomic bomb in history was dropped on Hiroshima. Amongst the many memorials and museums in Peace Park are the Peace Memorial Museum, which surveys the history of Hiroshima and the advent of the atomic bomb, and the A-Bomb Dome, all that remains of the former Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, one of the few buildings to remain standing. Enjoy some free time in the afternoon, followed by dinner at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

 

Tue 12 Nov / Hiroshima (Miyajima Island)

Today, journey by train and ferry to the island of Itsukushima, popularly known as Miyajima (or ‘Shrine Island’). Itsukushima is perhaps most famous for the Itsukushima Shrine, established during Empress Suiko’s reign and today a UNESCO World Heritage-listed site. The shrine and its torii – the traditional Japanese gate found at the entrance or within Shinto shrines – are designed to withstand the Seto Inland Sea’s strong tides. Return to Hiroshima by ferry in the late afternoon. (BL)

 

 

Wed 13 Nov / Hiroshima – Okayama

Check out of the hotel and transfer to the Adachi Art Museum in Yasugi. Set within a superb and unique garden, the museum was built to house the collection of modern Japanese paintings, ceramics and sculptures of local businessman and collector Zenko Adachi.

Continue to the small city of Takahashi located in the mountains to the north of Okayama, for a visit to the Raikyu-ji Temple, a Zen temple of the Rinzai sect that dates back to 1504. The beautifully constructed garden within the temple grounds is a Penglai Zen ‘dry garden’ constructed by Kobori Enshu, one of the founders of the Japanese tea ceremony, who is renowned for his architecture, garden design, calligraphy and poetry. Arrive at Okayama and check in to the hotel. Enjoy dinner at a local restaurant. (BLD)

 

 

Thu 14 Nov / Okayama

This morning, visit Koraku-en Garden, one of the most famous landscape gardens in Japan (along with Kanazawa’s Kenroku-en). Koraku-en is a spacious garden that incorporates the typical features of a Japanese landscape garden, including a large pond, streams, walking paths and a hill that serves as a lookout point.

Then, continue to Okayama Castle. Also known as ‘crow castle’ due to its black exterior, Okayama Castle was built in 1597 in the style of the Azuchi-Momoyama period. The original castle was destroyed in the last year of World War II, but a reconstruction was made in 1966. Enjoy an afternoon at leisure to further explore the city. (B)

 

 

Fri 15 Nov / Okayama – Kyoto

This morning, depart Okayama for Kyoto. With its hundreds of temples and gardens, Kyoto was the imperial capital between 794 and 1868, and remains the cultural centre of Japan.

Discover the Arashiyama-Sagano area situated on the western outskirts of Kyoto. The area is known for its scenic beauty, narrow streets, old villas and temple compounds. Walk through the area’s vast bamboo groves before dinner at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

 

Sat 16 Nov / Kyoto

Today, discover the elegant Nijō-jo Castle, built by the first Tokugawa Shōgun, a striking example of the splendid decorative luxury of the Momoyama period (1587–1615). Then visit the Kyoto Handicrafts Centre.

In the afternoon, visit the Ryōan-ji Temple, which houses the famous Zen rock garden. Ryōan-ji is the site of Japan’s famous rock garden consisting of a rectangular plot of pebbles surrounded by low earthen walls, with 15 rocks laid out in small groups on patches of moss. A feature of the garden’s design is that from any vantage point, at least one of the rocks is always hidden from the viewer.

Continue to the nearby Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) whose top two floors are completely covered in gold leaf. Built in 1397 as a villa for Shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, it has burned down numerous times throughout its history including twice during the Ōnin War, a civil war that destroyed much of Kyoto. It burned down once again in 1950, when it was set on fire by a fanatic monk. The present structure was rebuilt in 1955. (B)

 

 

Sun 17 Nov / Kyoto

This morning, visit the Kyoto National Museum for an introduction to the traditional arts of Japan. Continue to Sanjūsangen-dō, a uniquely shaped long hall rebuilt in 1251 to house its central image of the thousand-armed Bodhisattva Kannon, surrounded by 1,000 gilt bronze images of Kannon.

In the afternoon, explore Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion), a Zen temple at the foot of Kyoto’s eastern mountains. In 1482, Shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimasa built his retirement villa on the grounds of today’s temple, modelling it after Kinkaku-ji (which we visited yesterday). The villa was converted into a Zen temple after Yoshimasa’s death in 1490. Stroll along the Philosophers’ Path which follows a quiet tree-lined canal connecting Ginkaku-ji to the extensive buildings and grounds of one of the world’s largest Zen temples, Nanzen-ji. (B)

 

 

Mon 18 Nov / Kyoto

In the morning, visit Saihō-ji (Kokedera), an ancient temple said to have been established by the monk Gyōki during the Nara period (710 – 794), later restored and converted into a Zen temple by the monk Musō Soseki in 1339. The precincts are covered by more than 120 types of moss, resembling a beautiful green carpet, hence its other name, Kokedera, which literally means ‘Moss Temple’.

After lunch, explore the Daitoku-ji temple complex consisting of nearly two dozen sub-temples, and one of the best places in Japan to see a wide variety of Zen gardens, such as Daisen-in, a Zen contemplative garden. One part of the garden is an allegory, the other is designed for meditation.

Continue to an indigo-dying workshop and discover the fascinating secrets of this valuable blue dye and the techniques used for centuries in Japanese textiles and handicrafts. (BL)

Note: Tickets to visit Saiho-ji (Kokedera) will be available only two months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour of the garden as published, this is subject to change.

 

 

Tue 19 Nov / Kyoto

Today, spend the day at the fascinating Miho Museum nestled among the verdant Shigaraki Mountains. The museum houses the Shumei Family Collection of rare treasures from the ancient world and traditional Japanese art. This evening, celebrate the conclusion of the tour with a special farewell dinner with Genevieve and fellow travellers. (BLD)

 

 

Wed 20 Nov / Depart Kyoto

Tour arrangements conclude after breakfast.

For those departing Kyoto today, make your way to Ōsaka Kansai Airport for suggested Japan Airlines flights to Australia or New Zealand.
Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements, including any additional nights’ accommodation, either before or after the tour. (B)

 

Note: At time of publication (August 2018), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than two to three months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

 

 

Great Castles, Country Houses & Gardens of Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Wales

Great Castles, Country Houses & Gardens of Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Wales

 

**Early-Bird special BOOK before July 31**

 

ITINERARY

 

The following itinerary describes a range of castles, country houses, museums and other sites which we plan to include. Many are accessible to the public, but others require special permission which may only be confirmed closer to the tour’s departure. The daily activities described in this itinerary may change or be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate alterations in opening hours, flight schedules and confirmation of private visits. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents prior to departure. The tour includes breakfast daily, lunches & evening meals indicated in the detailed itinerary where: B=breakfast, L=lunch and D=evening meal.

 

 

York, Yorkshire – 6 nights

 

Day 1: Tuesday 28 May, Manchester Airport – Adel – York

Arrive Manchester Airport and transfer to Leeds
York Gate Garden: Guided tour of gardens and afternoon tea
Light (2-course) evening meal

Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight are scheduled to arrive into Manchester Airport around midday. Upon arrival we transfer by private coach to York, where we spend the next six nights. Those taking alternative flights should meet the group at the Manchester Airport Arrivals Hall – please contact ASA to arrange a suitable meeting time.

En route to York we visit the highly innovative ‘paradise’ garden of York Gate, a one-acre garden tucked away behind the ancient church in Adel, on the northern outskirts of Leeds. Created by the Spencer family during the second half of the 20th century, and in 1994 bequeathed to Perennial, the Gardeners’ Royal Benevolent Society (founded 1839), it is a garden of extraordinary style and craftsmanship, widely recognised as one of the most innovative small gardens of the period. The garden is divided by yew and beech hedges into a series of smaller gardens, each with its own theme and style. From the formality of the herb garden with its topiary, to the dell with its half-hidden pathways and stream, every area has an intimacy and charm of its own. Traditional materials are used with creativity and invention. From pretty paths to pergolas, detailing throughout is exquisite. Evergreens, clipped into strong architectural shapes, are used to spectacular effect throughout the garden.Tonight we enjoy a light (2-course) evening meal at our hotel. (Overnight York) D

 

Day 2: Wednesday 29 May, York – Harewood – Harrogate – York

Harewood House: Private tour, Thomas Chippendale and the Watercolours Collection
Spa Town of Harrogate
Evening Welcome Reception at Fairfax House (Exclusive private visit, to be confirmed in 2018)

This morning we travel through West Yorkshire to Harewood House. There we embark on a private tour of one of England’s greatest country houses, boasting architecture by John Carr (1772) and Charles Barry (1843), magnificent interiors by Adam, furniture by Thomas Chippendale, and a park designed by ‘Capability’ Brown. A particular focus of our tour will be the highly regarded watercolour painting collection.

We next visit the old spa town of Harrogate. Prior to the discovery of its iron- and sulphur-rich waters, Harrogate comprised two minor villages (High Harrogate and Low Harrogate), situated close to the historic town of Knaresborough. Harrogate’s first mineral spring was discovered in 1571 by William Slingsby, who found that water from the Tewitt Well possessed similar properties to that of the springs of the Belgian town of Spa (which gave its name to spa towns). The medicinal properties of Harrogate’s waters were widely publicised by one Edmund Deane, whose book Spadacrene Anglica, or The English Spa Fountain, was published in 1626 and Harrogate consequently developed considerable fame as a spa town.

This evening we walk from our hotel to Fairfax House, one of the finest Georgian houses in England. Here we enjoy the ambience of the house with beverages and canapés in a private reception, then take an exclusive tour of the house. (Overnight York) B

 

Day 3: Thursday 30 May, York

Guided Walking Tour of York, including York Minster
Afternoon at leisure

This morning we will take a walking tour of the historic centre of York. This vibrant city was founded by the Romans in 71AD. As Eboracum it was an important town in the Empire’s north and in 208 the entire Roman world was governed from here. After being virtually abandoned following the fall of the Roman Empire and the withdrawal of the army, the town saw a period of population by the Anglo Saxons. York was first invaded by the Viking army on 1 November 866 and a new era began. After a short period of invasion and conquest, the Vikings chose to settle in York (which they called Jorvik) rather than return to Scandinavia. Archaeological excavations have revealed a wealth of evidence of the successful metal-based industries that were developed here, as well as the city’s role in trade. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, York was second only to London in size and prosperity.

The next chapter in the city’s history is the Norman, when William the Conqueror marched on York intent on making this wealthy town part of his kingdom. He established a garrison here and built two castles to control access to the town from the River Ouse. There was considerable resistance to the Norman occupation of the town, with attempts to overthrow the new power. This was brutally suppressed in what is known as the ‘Harrying of the North’, when William extracted his vengeance on the population and many thousands died in a period of violence and famine, whilst the lively Viking city was systematically destroyed. The Normans rebuilt York and it is to this period a number of the city’s churches belong.

The medieval period was a Golden Age for York, when the town was a centre of trade and religion. However, following the War of the Roses and the defeat of Richard III to Henry Tudor, the city underwent another period of decline. The Reformation had a tremendous impact on York and its many churches and important religious houses which operated schools, hospitals, hospices and employed local citizens. The Dissolution of the Monasteries left a large hole in the finances of the city, and many religious buildings fell into disrepair. Elizabethan York saw a return to prosperity which continued until the Civil War, when the city was used as a Royalist stronghold and was besieged by the Parliamentarian army. Once again, the religious and business focus of the town allowed it to rise again to regional prominence, and the Industrial Revolution brought new business opportunities to the region.

The Georgian period coincided with a building boom and York now boasts many fine Georgian mansions. Our guide will point out the many layers of the city’s rich history that can be seen in the buildings, roads, walls and churches.

Our walking tour includes a visit to York Minster, one of England’s greatest cathedrals, which has a long, intricate history. The present building, which has the finest medieval stained glass in England, had a number of precursors. In 1069, for example, the Normans destroyed the Anglo-Saxon cathedral and so in 1080 its Archbishop, Thomas, began a new cathedral that was completed in 1100. In 1137 its east end was destroyed by fire. A new Romanesque choir was built in 1175, a south transept added in 1220, and the north transept completed in 1253. In 1394 the present choir was begun, and the foundations of the Lady Chapel laid in 1361. In 1338, the Great West Window was completed. The Great East Window followed in 1405, and the Minster, now completed, was consecrated in 1472. Meanwhile, the Minster’s original west towers had collapsed. The Minster became caught up in the Reformation – Thomas Wolsey was archbishop here – and in the Civil War, York remained a centre of Catholicism in England. 18th-century damage by fire and 19th-century restoration further modified this great building. Major restoration occurred again after another fire in 1984; in consequence York University has become one of England’s most important architectural conservation centres.

After the conclusion of our visit to York Minster the remainder of the day is free to explore York further, at leisure. (Overnight York) B

 

Day 4: Friday 31 May, York – Fountains Abbey – Newby Hall – York

Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal: Tour of Cistercian Abbey & Georgian Water Garden
Church of St Mary
Church of Christ the Consoler
Newby Hall & Gardens

Today we visit England’s largest ruined monastery, Fountains Abbey, situated in the beautiful Skell river valley, in which the 18th-century water garden of Studley Royal is also located. The view of the Abbey from the cliff above Studley Royal became a definitive instance of the ‘Picturesque’: a ruined Gothic abbey, evoking an ancient, pious culture, seen from a ‘modern’ 18th-century site. Flanked by two vast lawns set against awe-inspiring cliff faces, with the Skell running under its buildings, the Abbey is a masterpiece of 12th-century building ingenuity. Our tour of the site will take in spaces like the cellarium in which the lay brothers ate and slept; it retains much of its sophisticated vaulting.

In 1132 Fountains was founded in its isolated valley by Thurston, Archbishop of York, for a community that wished to return to a strict form of Benedictine rule; isolation being an ideal of medieval monasticism. The valley was sheltered from the weather and had clean water, plentiful wood, and building stone of high quality. The Abbey subsequently came under reforming Cistercian rule. The Cistercians followed a rigorous daily regime, committed to long periods of silence and a subsistence diet. They wore habits of coarse un-dyed sheep’s wool that earned them the name ‘White Monks’. After Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries (1536-40), glass and lead from Fountains found their way to Ripon and York. Its buildings and parts of its estate were sold to Sir Richard Gresham, whose family subsequently sold them to Stephen Proctor, the builder of Fountains Hall. In 1767 the ruins were sold for £18,000 to William Aislabie, creator of Studley Royal.

The Aislabie family created Studley Royal Water Garden in a wild and well-wooded part of the valley. Its formal, geometric design and its extraordinary vistas constitute a very imaginative, free and individualistic interpretation of French formal garden tradition. Ground level views emphasise its sweeping horizontality, relieved by fabriques and the kind of statues favoured by Grand Tourists to Rome; from higher up the garden’s complex structure reveals itself. Fabriques include the Neoclassical Temple of Piety (dedicated to Hercules), a rusticated Banqueting House, a Gothic octagon tower and a Temple of Fame, and a rotunda with wonderful views across the garden where 18th-century visitors picnicked. Other garden features include the Rustic Bridge, Hermit’s Grotto, Half Moon Pond, Cascades, Canal, Fishing Tabernacles, Drum Fall and the Seven Bridges Valley in the Deer Park. Our garden tour climaxes at the end of the High Ride at ‘The Surprise View’, also called ‘Anne Boleyn’s Seat’, because of a headless statue to be seen there! It gives a magnificent panorama of the distant Abbey ruins.

Returning from the end of the water gardens we climb a path through the fields to William Burges’ St Mary’s Church, one of Britain’s finest Gothic Revival churches. From outside its chancel you can see all the way to Ripon Cathedral.

We next tour the house and gardens at Newby Hall, one of England’s renowned Adam houses; its exceptional interior decoration and fine Neoclassical sculpture collection represent the epitome of 18th-century taste. Built in the 1690s in the style of Sir Christopher Wren, it was later enlarged and transformed by John Carr and subsequently by Robert Adam. It was the home of the Compton family and much of its superb collection was acquired on a Grand Tour by a Compton ancestor, William Weddell. The collection includes tapestries in the magnificent Gobelins Tapestry Room, a renowned gallery of classical statuary, and some of Chippendale’s finest furniture. Its glorious garden was designed in the 1920s by Major Edward Compton, who was strongly influenced by the garden of Hidcote. Newby Hall’s garden has many rare plants, including the National Collection of Cornus (Dogwood). It is famed for its main axis of double herbaceous borders, amongst the longest in Europe. Flanking this axis are numerous formal, compartmented gardens including a Rose Garden, a Water Garden, Autumn Garden and even a Tropical Garden. (Overnight York) BL

 

Day 5: Saturday 1 June, York – Castle Howard – Thirsk – Markenfield Hall – York

Castle Howard: Private Guided tour of house & morning tea
Market Town of Thirsk, the Darrowby of the late James Herriot
Markenfield Hall

This morning we will have a private tour of a masterpiece of the Baroque, one of England’s greatest country houses, Castle Howard, the setting for the BBC series Brideshead Revisited. The 3rd Earl of Carlisle commissioned the ‘castle’ (a term often used for country mansions with no military purpose) from the gentleman-dilettante Sir John Vanbrugh, a fellow member of the famous Whig Kit-Cat Club. Nicholas Hawksmoor, architect of a number of Oxford colleges, assisted Vanbrugh here and at Blenheim. Vanbrugh designed a Baroque structure with two wings projecting symmetrically on either side of a north-south axis.

Castle Howard’s crowning central dome over the Great Hall, where we have a morning tea of homemade shortbread, was added as an afterthought. The East Wing and the east end of the Garden Front, the Central Block (including the dome), and the west end of the Garden Front all received exuberant Baroque decoration of coronets, cherubs and urns. Doric pilasters are on the north front and Corinthian on the south. Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, the Venetian Rococo painter, designed many of the house’s interiors when he was living in England between 1708 and 1713. Much of his painting was unfortunately destroyed in a fire in 1940. The house remained incomplete on the death of the 3rd Earl in 1738, and Vanbrugh’s design was never completed. The West Wing was designed in a Palladian style for the 4th Earl by Sir Thomas Robinson and was not completed until 1811. Much of the house, including the central dome, was destroyed by fire in 1940. Most of the devastated rooms were restored and the house was opened to the public in 1952.

Castle Howard has extensive and diverse gardens, including a large formal garden immediately behind the house. The house, flanked by two lakes, is prominently situated on a ridge, which was exploited to create a landscape garden that lies beyond the formal garden and merges with the surrounding park. Occupying this landscape are the Temple of the Four Winds at the end of the garden and the Mausoleum in the park. Castle Howard also has an arboretum called Ray Wood, and a walled garden that contains decorative rose and flower gardens. The garden architecture at Castle Howard also includes the ruined Pyramid, an Obelisk and several follies and other motifs in the form of fortifications. Another huge arboretum, called Kew at Castle Howard, was established in 1975 as a joint venture between Castle Howard and Kew Gardens. Managed by the Castle Howard Arboretum Trust, it has one of the most important collections of specimen trees in the United Kingdom.

Many of us grew up watching the television series All Creatures Great and Small and late this morning we travel to the bustling market town of Thirsk, where the stories originated. James Alfred Wight (James Herriot) moved to Thirsk to work as a country vet with Donald Sinclair in July 1940. Here there will be some time at leisure for lunch and to explore the town on a Saturday, which is Market Day.

Our day’s program concludes with a private tour of Markenfield Hall, a charming medieval moated manor house. The privately owned home is tucked away down a mile-long winding drive and is the most complete surviving example of a medium-sized 14th-century country house in England. The earliest part of the house dates to c.1230, while the main sections were built 1310-1325 for John de Markenfield, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Edward II, with further additions and alterations in the 16th, 18th and 19th centuries. The history of the home has always been deeply intertwined with the fortunes of Fountains Abbey and it was one of the most important centres of the 1569 ‘Rising of the North’. The house has been lovingly restored and in 2008 it was the first recipient of the Sotheby’s/Historic Houses Association Restoration Award, a prize that recognises the finest restoration of a historic house in Britain in a way which respects and is in sympathy with the age and quality of the building. (Overnight York) B

 

Day 6: Sunday 2 June, York – Scampston Estate – Mansion Cottage – Burton Agnes Hall – York

Walled Garden of Scampston Hall
Mansion Cottage
Burton Agnes Hall

We begin this morning by driving to Scampston Hall, situated in peaceful North Yorkshire, to visit its famous Walled Garden. Sir Charles and Lady Legard’s stunningly beautiful contemporary garden is quite unlike any other. Opened to the public for the first time in 2004, it has been received with great acclaim by visitors from all over the world. Set within the 18th-century walls of Scampston’s original kitchen garden, today the Walled Garden has an exciting and unashamedly modern feel to it and complements the adjacent 18th-century ‘Capability’ Brown park. The garden had been derelict for nearly fifty years before Sir Charles and Lady Legard undertook the huge task of renovating. Having adopted a traditional approach to the restoration of the house and park, they here produced a stunning garden with a contemporary feel with the help of leading garden designer, Piet Oudolf.

We next visit the small, private garden of Chris and Polly Myers’ Mansion Cottage. This hidden garden offers beautiful views and a tranquil atmosphere. Lush, vibrant perennial planting is highlighted with grasses; features include a globe garden, mini hosta walk, 100-foot border, summerhouse, vegetable plot, cuttery, bee and butterfly border, ponds, decking areas and lawns.

Having visited two contemporary gardens we now travel back in time to visit Burton Agnes Hall, an exquisite Elizabethan house filled with fine art, furniture, porcelain and impressionist and modern paintings. Fifteen generations have filled the Hall with treasures over five centuries, from magnificent carvings commissioned when the Hall was built to French Impressionist paintings, contemporary furniture, tapestries and other modern artwork. Lawns and topiary bushes surround the Hall and its gardens contain a maze, giant games, a jungle garden, and more than four thousand plant species. Burton Agnes Hall’s walled garden won the Historic Houses Association and Christies’ Garden of the Year Award 2005. We shall be given a guided tour of this beautiful property before returning to York. (Overnight York) BL

 

Buxton, Derbyshire – 4 nights

 

Day 7: Monday 3 June, York – Renishaw Hall – Haddon Hall – Buxton

Renishaw Hall: Private Literary Tour of the Sitwell family home & gardens (to be confirmed in 2018)
Bakewell
Haddon Hall

We depart York early this morning and travel south to Renishaw Hall, a country house in Derbyshire where the Sitwell family has lived in this ancestral home for nearly four centuries. On arrival we take a tour of Renishaw’s beautiful Italianate garden, park and lake, that were created by Sir George Sitwell, father of Osbert, Edith and Sacheverall. Sir George spent much of his life in Italy, where he had bought the huge former palace-villa of the Florentine Acciaiuoli family, Montegufoni. In England, he wanted to create an Italian garden in contrast to Gertrude Jekyll’s ‘colourful’ designs. The use of water, fountains, temples, cave and avenues adds effect and shelter for tender specimen plants.

The interior of Renishaw Hall, which features an antechamber designed by Edwin Lutyens, is graced with many Italian artworks and pieces of furniture collected by Sir George. The painting collection includes Salvator Rosa’s Belisarius in Disgrace, a painting that was once much appreciated by Benjamin Franklin. Our tour will have a literary focus, as Renishaw Hall is a house ‘built on books’, with a wide range of literary interests and connections over a period of almost 400 years. Each Sitwell generation has made its unique contribution to the literary legacy of the house and the family, particularly the famous ‘literary trio’ – Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. Our tour will follow the fortunes of the Sitwell family as wealthy book collectors in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and will include a special visit to the Renishaw Hall Library.

After free time for lunch in the small market town of Bakewell (famous for its pudding) we continue our tour of Derbyshire with a visit to Haddon Hall, arguably the finest example of a fortified medieval manor house in existence, and dating mostly from the 14th and 15th centuries. Originally owned by the descendants of William the Conqueror’s illegitimate son, Peverel, it was passed through marriage to the Manners family, later to become Dukes of Rutland, in whose possession it has remained. Haddon Hall affords a wonderful glimpse of English Early Modern country house design, because it remained closed and empty for two hundred years after the Dukes of Rutland moved to Belvoir Castle in the 17th century. The 9th Duke of Rutland reopened it in the 1920s. Because the grounds had escaped transformation into a landscape garden it influenced Edwardian gardeners deeply; its series of 17th-century terraces were particularly important. It embodies a vision of ‘old England’ symbolised by the rambling roses growing over its old stone walls. These roses are quite superb (some are 80 years old), and also impressive are the delphinium beds. There are recreations of 17th century box-edged parterres or knots, and below there are wonderful river meadows with a small and large stone bridge, which feature prominently in the 2006 BBC TV dramatisation of Jane Eyre. The approach to the house has a wonderful topiary garden.

The house itself has sections from a number of periods from the late 12th century to c.1620. The Banqueting Hall is medieval, but the house is predominantly Elizabethan, its pride being the oak panelled Long Gallery; the diamond panes of the gallery’s many windows are set at different angles to facilitate the entry of daylight. It also has a magnificent collection of English, Flemish and French tapestries, remains of a larger collection lost in a 1925 fire. Most important are five early 17th century English tapestries that may have belonged to King Charles I. The chapel has medieval frescoes, and the house also has a fine painting by Rex Whistler (1933), the artist of Plas Newydd.

Next we continue our journey to the elegant spa town of Buxton, which will be our base for the next four nights. Our hotel, built in 1550 by the Earl of Shrewsbury, the 4th husband of formidable Bess of Hardwick, is reputedly the oldest in England and has hosted during its long history such luminaries as Mary, Queen of Scots and Daniel Defoe. It is located in the centre of the town opposite one of the most exquisite Edwardian opera houses in the British Isles. (Overnight Buxton) B

 

Day 8: Tuesday 4 June, Buxton – Peak District – Castleton – Lyme Park – Buxton

White Peak District
Castleton Village, Peak District National Park
Lyme Park, House & Garden
Lecture by Sir Richard FitzHerbert: ‘Country Houses of Derbyshire’

This morning we enjoy the stunning and diverse scenery of Britain’s first designated national park, the Peak District National Park (1951). The Peak District is situated at the southern end of the Pennines in Central England and covers most of northern Derbyshire as well as parts of Cheshire, Yorkshire and Staffordshire. It has been prominent in numerous movies and TV dramas, including the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. A local guide will point out some of the locations used during filming whilst introducing Derbyshire’s bustling market towns, villages, and showing us its hills, dales and rivers.

Following lunch in Castleton, one of the most beautiful villages in the Peak District, we visit Lyme Park, the largest house in Cheshire. A Tudor house transformed into an Italianate palace, it is famous for its role as ‘Pemberley’, Darcy’s home, in the BBC’s 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice. Aficionados of the series will recall the scene of Lizzy meeting the dripping figure of Mr Darcy following his dip in the lake! Thomas Legh, an intrepid explorer and collector who made a pioneering journey through Egypt and up the Nile in 1816, saved Lyme Park from ruin. An extremely wealthy young man, he set Lewis Wyatt the huge task of reviving this vast, outdated family home. Wyatt’s remodelling, although extremely thorough, in no way compromised the 17th-century character of Lyme Park. The saloon, with its magnificent rococo ceiling and Grinling Gibbons-carved wood decorations, speaks amply of his sensitive approach.

This evening we are joined by Sir Richard FitzHerbert, who inherited Tissington Hall and the Estate from his uncle, the late Sir John FitzHerbert, at the age of 24 in 1989. Sir Richard will provide an illustrated lecture entitled ‘Country Houses of Derbyshire’. (Overnight Buxton) BL

 

Day 9: Wednesday 5 June, Buxton – Tissington Hall – Chatsworth House – Buxton

Tissington Hall & Gardens
Tissington Village & Norman Church of St Mary
Chatsworth House: one of the grandest Whig country houses (to be confirmed in 2018)

This morning we journey into Derbyshire to Tissington Hall, a beautiful Jacobean mansion where eight generations of the FitzHerbert family have lived. Tissington presides over a quintessentially English village, complete with duck pond and village green. This is one of the few remaining privately owned villages left in Britain. As it has no road markings or street lighting it is often used for filming period pieces, such as the BBC’s Jane Eyre (2006) and The Duchess (2007). We will take a guided tour of the hall and its gardens, as well as the village and the Norman Church of St Mary.

This afternoon we visit Chatsworth House, one of the grandest Whig country houses, situated in a spectacular landscape in the heart of the Peak District. It is the home of the 12th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, of the Cavendish family. The late Duchess, born Deborah Mitford (Debo) (1920-2014), the youngest of the famous Mitford sisters, revived the economy of the estate after it had been almost destroyed by death duties following the death of the 10th Duke in 1950 (the Chatsworth Settlement). The core of the house is from 1552, but its great days date from the 1690s, after the 4th Earl of Devonshire was created 1st Duke in 1694 for his part in the Glorious Revolution (1688). Generations of prominent Whigs followed and so Chatsworth represents the first phase of the great Whig country house (Stowe represents the second). The 1st Duke rebuilt the old house in stages, adding its fine Baroque façades, and it was substantially complete by 1707. The Painted Hall, whose ceilings and walls carry scenes of the life of Julius Caesar (1692-94) by Louis Laguerre, leads to a grand staircase. The State Apartments are the most important late Baroque presentation rooms in England, with ceilings by Laguerre and Mortlake tapestries made from Raphael’s tapestry cartoons now in the Victoria & Albert Museum. The chapel, designed by Cibber, is equally impressive, with illusionistic paintings by Laguerre and woodcarvings by Grinling Gibbons.

Chatsworth’s late Baroque gardens, like almost all great English Baroque gardens, were swept away when the 4th Duke commissioned Capability Brown to replace them (1760s). One survival is an Italianate cascade designed in 1696 by Grillet, a pupil of Le Nôtre. Thomas Archer, arguably the English architect who best understood the Italian Baroque, added the Temple or Cascade House above it in 1703. In the 19th century Joseph Paxton, the 6th Duke’s gardener, created a great glasshouse for exotic specimens; its revolutionary design led to his architectural triumph, London’s Crystal Palace. Paxton also built the Emperor fountain, whose jet rises 280 feet, and a vast rock garden. Newer additions to the garden include a serpentine hedge. (Overnight Buxton) B

 

Day 10: Thursday 6 June, Buxton – Quarry Bank – Buxton – Baslow Hall – Buxton

Quarry Bank Mill & Styal Estate
Walking Tour of Buxton, followed by time at leisure
Group Dinner at Fischer’s, Baslow Hall

This morning we drive to Quarry Bank Mill, a rare Georgian cotton mill that is both one of Britain’s most important industrial heritage sites as well as a working mill that produces over 9000m (10,000 yards) of cloth each year. Founded in 1784 by a young textile merchant, Samuel Greg, Quarry Bank Mill was one of the first generation of water-powered cotton spinning mills. By the 1830s Samuel Greg & Co. was one of the largest cotton manufacturing businesses in Britain with four other mills as well as Quarry Bank.

This mill reflects the earliest phase of the industrialisation of England, when manufacturing had not yet moved to great industrial cities, but rather occurred where water was plentiful. Such early industrial complexes often are built in a fine, simple architectural style not unlike some of the earliest colonial architecture in Australia. Our visit here offers a unique opportunity to see the two major sources of power available during the Industrial Revolution. The most powerful working waterwheel in Britain illustrates how power can be harnessed to drive machinery. A Boulton and Watt type beam engine (c.1830) and an 1880s Horizontal Engine powered by steam bring the past to life. Chief Engineer Barry Cook will be on hand to explain how everything operates. Time permitting, we also visit the three-hectare (8-acre) ‘Secret Garden’, the Greg family’s lovely, picturesque valley retreat adjoining the mill. Recently restored, it has now been opened to the public for the first time.

We return to Buxton for a short walking tour of the town, followed by time at leisure to continue exploring. Tonight we dine at Fischer’s Restaurant at Baslow Hall. The Michelin-starred dining room serves classical dishes created with balance and finesse, using the very best of fresh local and regional produce. The setting within a charming manor house further enhances this very special dining experience. (Overnight Buxton) BD

 

Chester, Cheshire – 3 nights

 

Day 11: Friday 7 June, Buxton – Little Moreton – Biddulph Grange Garden – Chester

Little Moreton Hall
Biddulph Grange Garden: Private guided tour of this amazing Victorian Garden

This morning we drive to Little Moreton Hall for a guided tour of one of Britain’s finest timber-framed, moated Tudor manor houses, which featured in David Dimbleby’s How we built Britain documentary (2007). Of particular importance is its magnificent Long Gallery that has unusual plasterwork. Its grounds feature a delightful knot garden.

This afternoon we take a private tour of Biddulph Grange Gardens. Biddulph is a treasure trove of 19th-century eccentricities and a rare surviving example of a High Victorian garden. Our private guided tour of the garden, to be opened specially for our group, leads us down tunnels and pathways taking us on a miniature tour of the world, with rare and exotic plantings and picturesque garden architecture, such as an Egyptian court and elegant Italian terraces. There is a unique Chinese garden with a temple enclosed within its own Great Wall of China. Some of the more eccentric features of the garden are an upside-down tree and strange stone sculpture. Biddulph also has an unusual geological gallery where the garden’s creator, James Bateman, showed his fossil and geological collection. It was arranged to correspond with the seven days of creation in the Genesis story and is contemporaneous with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859), a seminal work in scientific literature and a pivotal work in evolutionary biology.

We next drive a short distance to the city of Chester, lying on the River Dee, close to the border of Wales. (Overnight Chester) B

 

Day 12: Saturday 8 June, Chester

Walking Tour of Chester
Guided Tour of Chester Cathedral
Afternoon at leisure

A Roman legion founded Chester on the Dee River in the 1st century A.D. It reached its pinnacle as a bustling port in the 13th and 14th centuries but declined following the gradual silting up of the river. While other walls of medieval cities of England were either torn down or badly fragmented, Chester still has 3 kilometres of fortified city walls intact. The main entrance into Chester is Eastgate, which dates only from the 18th century. Within the walls are half-timbered houses and shops, though not all of them date from Tudor days. Chester is unusual in that some of its builders used black-and-white timbered facades even during the Georgian and Victorian eras.

This morning we take an orientation tour of this interesting medieval city, followed by a visit to Chester Cathedral. The present building, founded in 1092 as a Benedictine abbey, was made an Anglican cathedral church in 1541. Many architectural restorations were carried out in the 19th century, but older parts have been preserved. Notable features include the fine range of monastic buildings, particularly the cloisters and refectory, the chapter house, and the superb medieval woodcarving in the choir (especially the misericords). Also worth seeing are the long south transept with its various chapels, the consistory court, and the medieval roof bosses in the Lady Chapel.

The afternoon is free for you to further explore Chester at leisure. (Overnight Chester) B

 

Day 13: Sunday 9 June, Chester – Liverpool – Chester

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Time at leisure at Liverpool’s refurbished Albert Dock
The Beatles sites: Penny Lane, Strawberry Field, Mendips and 20 Forthlin Road (exteriors)

Liverpool, with its famous waterfront on the River Mersey, is a great shipping port and industrial center and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. King John launched Liverpool on its road to glory when he granted it a charter in 1207. Before that, it had been a tiny 12th-century fishing village, but it quickly became a port for shipping men and materials to Ireland. In the 18th century, it grew to prominence because of the sugar, spice, and tobacco trade with the Americans. By the time Victoria came to the throne, Liverpool had become Britain’s biggest commercial seaport.

This morning we drive to Liverpool to visit the Walker Art Gallery, opened in 1877. Here, we focus on its Pre-Raphaelite collection and its Victorian sculpture. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in London in 1848, consisted of seven young artists dedicated to the revival of styles that preceded the High Renaissance: John Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Collinson, F G Stephens, Thomas Woolmer and William Michael Rossetti. Liverpool was the only provincial city with its own Pre-Raphaelite school (The Liverpool Academy). The Walker Art Gallery collection includes Rossetti’s Dante’s Dream (1871), Millais’ Isabella, Holman Hunt’s Triumph of the Innocents and one of the world’s finest corpora of Victorian sculpture.

We take a short walk to Liverpool’s recently refurbished Albert Dock, where there will be time at leisure to explore this precinct. Albert Dock features a number of museums, including the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the award-winning ‘Beatle Story’ and numerous restaurants and cafés. In your leisure time you may wish to visit the Tate Liverpool, which displays much of the National Collection of 20th-century art, complemented by changing art exhibitions of international standing such as the prints of Joan Miró or the sculptures of the iconoclastic British sculptress Rachel Whiteread.

Before returning to Chester we make a short tour to view a number of the sites associated with the Beatles including Penny Lane, Strawberry Field and the childhood homes of John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney. (Overnight Chester) B

 

 

Portmeirion, Wales – 3 nights

 

Day 14: Monday 10 June, Chester – Erddig Hall – Powis Castle – Portmeirion

Erddig Hall: private tour of house
Powis Castle and Garden
Dinner at Hotel Portmeirion

Early this morning we depart Chester and cross into Wales for a private tour of Erddig Hall. Located on the outskirts of Wrexham, Erddig is one of the finest and evocative country houses in Britain, reflecting the upstairs-downstairs life of a gentry family over 250 years. Mainly of the 18th century, it has fine furniture, textiles and wallpaper. The servants’ quarters are particularly well preserved.

We continue south to Powis Castle and have lunch here on arrival. Powis, a 13th-century border castle, features the rare 17th-century Baroque garden of William Herbert, first Marquess of Powis. Herbert, a Roman Catholic, went into exile with James II after the Glorious Revolution (1688). In 1703 the Herberts returned from exile, their taste shaped by great French gardens such as St Germain-en-Laye, where the Stuart court was located. This put them out of step with new directions in Whig landscape gardening. Their grand Baroque terraces survive, with an extraordinary yew hedge, planted in 1720, that is now old and irregular in a way never intended when it was first established. Powis did not escape change entirely. A Dutch-style water garden laid out in 1705 in the flat meadows below the castle was swept away in the 1770s, and in part of this area an Edwardian formal garden was laid out in 1912. The Baroque terraces enjoy magnificent views. Against them are spectacular herbaceous borders by Graham Stuart Thomas and Jimmy Handcock. There are rich flower displays in vases on the edges of the terraces and in its niches. They are lined with lead statues by John van Nost, examples of the early 18th-century taste for picturesque Italianate rustic garden figures. In the castle courtyard stands a lead statue of Pegasus bearing aloft the personification of Fame, original centrepiece of the lost Dutch water garden. Van Nost’s pupil, Andries Carpentiére, based it on Antoine Coysevox’s group of Fame at Louis XIV’s palace at Marly. South and east of the castle is a Wilderness with a fine collection of trees and shrubs planted in the 20th century.

A Herbert family member married into the Clive family in the 18th century and their descendants own Powis today. Powis’ Clive Museum displays superb Indian treasures collected by family members, including Robert, ‘Clive of India’. The castle interior has a fine Baroque staircase (1674-1685) with a ceiling by Verrio, its walls painted in 1705 by his pupil Gerard Landscroon, who also painted the library. G.F. Bodley’s dining room with fine panelled walls and Jacobean plasterwork and his Oak Drawing Room are fine examples of Edwardian taste. A grand Baroque state bedroom (1665-1685) is the only one in Britain with a bed railed with a balustrade in the manner of Louis XIV’s Versailles. A superb T-shaped Elizabethan Long Gallery (1587-1595) has original plasterwork and chimneypieces. The castle’s sculpture collection includes marble busts of Roman emperors and a Roman statue of a cat playing with a snake that Robert Clive acquired in Rome. An interesting painting collection includes a fine view of Verona by Bernardo Bellotto.

From Powis Castle we cross the mountains, rising above the treeline, before descending into Gwynedd, an area in north-west Wales. We make our way to the resort village of Portmeirion, our base for the next three nights. Portmeirion is the creation of the flamboyant Arts and Crafts architect and garden designer Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978), a dedicated sailor who loved the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and, especially, Portofino, and decided to create his own version of them in Wales. In 1925 he bought a spectacular Snowdonian peninsula site not far from his family house at Plas Brondanw, overlooking an estuary that forms a vast sandy beach at low tide. On the cliffs above Portmeirion’s only pre-existing structure (now Hotel Portmeirion) he built a range of picturesque buildings and towers as a kind of village-hotel. Many writers, including Evelyn Waugh, lived and wrote here in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. These village houses surround a garden, forming a colourful, seaside version of Arts and Crafts taste. Many are tiny and are built using parts of demolished buildings. Clough later espoused a Romantic version of the Dutch 17th and 18th-century style. He was not afraid to create buildings in painted sheet metal, sometimes painted illusionistically to give a sense of relief, or to create buildings that had no other function than to look interesting: he built a domed building because he felt an Italianate coastal village should have one. Portmeiron also has interesting woodland walks, one of which takes you past a pet cemetery and ‘lighthouses’.

Williams-Ellis wanted to demonstrate that architecture could be both beautiful and fun but he was also a serious conservationist and town planner. He argued against uncontrolled suburban development (England and the Octopus), founded the Council for the Protection of Rural England, saved Stowe, and contributed to the planning of New Towns in post WWII Britain. His daughter created the Portmeirion pottery works, which is still run by the family. Tonight we enjoy a group dinner at Hotel Portmeirion. (Overnight Portmeirion) BLD

 

Day 15: Tuesday 11 June, Portmeirion – Caernarfon – Llanberis – Snowdonia National Park – Portmeirion

Caernarfon Castle: the greatest of the Edwardian Castles
Dolbardarn Castle (exterior only)
Snowdon Mountain Railway – excursion by diesel engine to summit
Dinner at Castell Deudraeth

This morning we head further north along the coast to reach Caernarfon, located at the southern end of the Menai Strait between north Wales and Anglesey. Caernarfon was considered a strategically excellent place to build a castle during Edward I’s invasions of Wales. Completed in 1330, the castle was built on a site that had once been a Roman fort and then a Norman motte and bailey; it was to become a symbol of English dominance in a region strong in Welsh tradition and anti-English feeling. To stamp his supremacy even further on the native population, Edward ensured that the birth of his son, the first English Prince of Wales, took place in the castle (1284) and the castle continues to be the setting for the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, the last being Prince Charles in 1969.

Following lunchtime at leisure, we view Dolbadarn Castle. Built for Llywelyn the Great in the 1230s, it features a massive round-towered keep. We then take the cogwheel railway train to the summit of Snowdon to enjoy the breathtaking views over the area. In the late afternoon we return to Portmeirion.

Tonight we dine at Castell Deudraeth, a Victorian castellated mansion Williams-Ellis bought from his uncle in 1931 with the intention of incorporating it into the Portmeirion hotel complex. The intervening war and subsequent building restrictions delayed its incorporation until 2001 when it was finally opened. Portmeirion is now owned by a charitable trust. (Overnight Portmeirion) BD

 

Day 16: Wednesday 12 June, Portmeirion – Harlech – Plas Brondanw – Portmeirion

Harlech Castle
Plas Brondanw Gardens
Afternoon at leisure in the village of Portmeirion

This morning we make a brief visit to Harlech Castle. Men of Harlech or The March of the Men of Harlech is a song and military march which is traditionally said to describe events during the longest siege in British history (1461-1468) which took place here during the War of the Roses. Edward’s tried and tested ‘walls within walls’ model was put together in super-fast time between 1283 and 1295 by an army of nearly a thousand skilled craftsmen and labourers. The structure boasts two rings of walls and towers, with an immensely strong east gatehouse. It was impregnable from almost every angle. Its secret weapon was a 200-foot (61m) long stairway which still leads from the castle to the cliff base. Access via the stairway to the sea and crucial supplies kept the castle’s besieged inhabitants fed and watered. When it was first built, a channel would have connected the castle and the sea. You could have sailed a boat up to the moat. Seven hundred years later, the sea has receded and you could say the castle appears almost stranded, waiting for the tide to turn once more.

Next we visit Plas Brondanw, the home of Clough Williams-Ellis between 1902 and 1960. It has one of the great Arts and Crafts gardens, noted for its structure of yew-hedged compartments. Inspired by stunning views of the mountains of Snowdonia, Clough cleverly ‘borrowed’ the peaks of the Snowdon and Cnight mountains visually by using the former to establish the chief axis of the garden, and revealing the latter through a window-opening cut in a hedge. Within the grounds of Plas Brondanw is Folly Castle, described on a plaque as ‘a wedding present from the Welsh Guards to Clough Williams-Ellis and Amabel Strachey in 1915. Located on a small hill, the folly affords good views of the surrounding landscape. It has featured in the film Inn of the Sixth Happiness and the Doctor Who film, The Five Doctors. We enjoy a light buffet-style lunch at Plas Brondanw before retuning to Portmeirion, where we have the afternoon and evening at leisure to explore the village and its beautiful gardens. (Overnight Portmeirion) BL

 

 

Bodysgallen Hall, Conwy, Wales – 3 nights

 

Day 17: Thursday 13 June, Portmeirion – Gwydir Castle – Bodnant Garden – Bodysgallen Hall

Gwydir Castle
Bodnant Garden
Gardens of Bodysgallen Hall
Dinner at Bodysgallen Hall

This morning we drive to Gwydir Castle beneath Carreg y Gwalch (Rock of the Falcon), the ancestral home of the powerful Wynn Family, descendants of the kings of Gwynedd, and one of the most significant families of North Wales during the Tudor and Stuart periods. The Castle is being sympathetically restored by the present owners, who will introduce us to their house and garden.

Following our tour of Gwydir Castle we travel to Bodnant Garden. Bodnant Garden occupies an 80-acre westward sloping site above the River Conwy that looks across the valley towards the Snowdonia range. Its spectacular garden was the inspired work of the second Lord Aberconway who in 1902, with his mother’s encouragement, conceived and constructed its great terraces and organised the mass planting of Chinese rhododendrons. Appointed in 1920, Bodnant’s head gardener, Frederick Puddle, undertook an extensive and successful rhododendron hybridising programme, a project continued until today by three generations of Aberconways and Puddles. It is the archetypal plantperson’s garden, where exotic species brought from China or the Himalayas were first cultivated in Britain.

The garden has two parts. The upper part surrounding the house consists of five Italianate terraces on which herbaceous borders surround informal shady lawns. Its most famous feature is the laburnum walk, a fifty-five metre long tunnel that becomes a mass of yellow blooms from late May to early June. Lower down is the Pin-Mill, a reconstructed garden folly. From here the ground drops away to a deep, damp valley, known as The Dell, along which rushes the river Hiraethlyn. Here, in the Pinetum and Wild Garden, grow Britain’s earliest plantings of the Metasequoia (Dawn Redwood), discovered only in the 1940s.

From Bodnant Garden we continue north to Bodysgallen Hall, which will be our base for the next 3 nights. Bodysgallen is a manor house in Conwy county borough, north Wales, near the village of Llanrhos. Since 2008 the house has been owned by the National Trust. We plan to arrive at the hall in time for you to enjoy a walk through the hall’s magnificent 200 acres of gardens before dinner. (Overnight Bodysgallen Hall) BD

 

Day 18: Friday 14 June, Bodysgallen Hall – Penrhyn Castle – Conwy – Bodysgallen Hall

Penrhyn Castle
Time at leisure in Conwy
Plas Mawr
Conwy Castle

This morning we journey along the coast to visit the enormous Penrhyn Castle, which sits beween Snowdonia and the Menai Strait. Built in 1820-35 in neo-Norman style, this is one of the most sumptuous country houses of its time. It features a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria, elaborate carvings, plasterwork and mock-Norman furniture. It also has an outstanding collection of paintings. The stable block houses a fascinating railway museum.

Midday we travel to Conwy, and following some time at leisure for lunch we visit Plas Mawr, possibly the best preserved Elizabethan town house in Great Britain. It was built by Robert Wynn between 1576 and 1585 and its interior has elaborately decorated plaster ceilings and fine wooden screens.

Castle Conwy, which, like Caernarfon, was constructed by Edward I between 1283 and 1289 as one of the key fortresses in his ‘iron ring’ of castles to contain the Welsh, dominates the town. A World Heritage site, Conwy has no concentric ‘walls within walls’ because they were not needed. Its massive military strength springs from the rock on which it stands and seems to grow naturally. Soaring curtain walls and eight huge round towers give the castle an intimidating presence undimmed by the passage of time.

This evening we are at leisure. You may wish to dine at Bodysgallen Hall, or perhaps take a short taxi ride (approx. 10 mins) to the seaside town of Llandudno. (Overnight Bodysgallen Hall) B

 

Day 19: Saturday 15 June, Bodysgallen Hall – Anglesey Island – Bodysgallen Hall

Plas Newydd House & Gardens
Bryn Celli Ddu Burial Chamber
Farewell Dinner at Bodysgallen Hall

This morning we depart Bodysgallen Hall for an excursion to the Isle of Anglesey. Here we visit the house and gardens at Plas Newydd. James Wyatt redesigned this elegant old home in the 18th century in a Gothic style and its 1930s interior is famous for its association with Rex Whistler. Like Williams-Ellis, Whistler belonged to that underrated strand of mid 20th-century British culture that looked to the past with gusto. Uninhibited by modernist theory, they did not hesitate to revive the great traditions of the past. In the dining room, Whistler created his masterpiece, a vast mural for the sixth Marquess of Anglesey. This mural, eighteen metres wide, was executed on one enormous piece of canvas that Whistler had made on a special French loom. Within an Arcadian and Romantic coastal landscape are romantic allusions to Whistler’s unrequited love for Lady Caroline, the beautiful eldest married daughter. On the painting’s left side is a depiction of Romeo and Juliet in which the young Whistler (Romeo) languishes beneath the balcony of Lady Caroline (Juliet).

The mild climate of the coastal setting of the gardens at Plas Newydd is ideal for many woody plants from warmer temperate regions of the world. While the bones of the garden were set out in the late 18th century by leading landscape gardener Humphrey Repton, much has changed in the intervening centuries. A long and broad sweep of lawn fringed and broken by trees to the west of the house is known as ‘the West Indies’, and at the end of the Long Walk you arrive at an arboretum known as ‘Australasia’ that features, among other things, a collection of eucalyptus, added in the 20th century. A wild and exotic wood of rhododendrons was established in the 1930s by the sixth Marquess and added to by the ‘thinnings’ sent from Lord Aberconway of Bodnant as a wedding present to Lord Anglesey in 1948. For three seasons, lorry-loads of rhododendrons arrived with two gardeners to plant them.

Following a light lunch at Plas Newydd’s café, we visit the prehistoric site of Bryn Celli Ddu, meaning ‘the mound in the dark grove’. This is an impressive Neolithic chambered tomb with partially restored entrance passage and mound, on the site of a former henge monument.

In the late afternoon we return to Conwy, where we shall enjoy a farewell dinner together at Bodysgallen Hall. (Overnight Bodysgallen Hall) BLD

 

Day 20: Sunday 16 June, Bodysgallen Hall – Manchester Airport.

Tour Ends.
Departure transfer to Manchester Airport

This morning we depart Bodysgallen Hall and travel to Manchester Airport for our return flight to Australia. The ASA ‘designated’ flight is scheduled to depart in the early afternoon. B

 

Physical Endurance & Practical Information

Physical Rating

The number of flags is a guide to the degree of difficulty of ASA tours relative to each other (not to those of other tour companies). It is neither absolute nor literal. One flag is given to the least taxing tours, seven to the most. Flags are allocated, above all, according to the amount of walking and standing each tour involves. Nevertheless, all ASA tours require that participants have a good degree of fitness enabling 2-3 hours walking or 1-1.5 hours standing still on any given site visit or excursion. Many sites are accessed by climbing slopes or steps and have uneven terrain.

This 20-day Cultural Garden Tour of England & Wales involves:

A large amount of walking (ranging from one to five kilometres per day) often up and down hills, flights of stairs, cobbled streets, and uneven ground (especially during some of the garden site visits), and/or standing, interspersed with coach travel.
Extensive coach travel, some on winding country roads.
Visiting a range of towns and villages on foot, involving walks uphill from bus parks to historic town centres and other sites.
Many early-morning departures (between 8.00-8.30am), concluding in the late afternoon (5.30-6.30pm).
Travelling to the United Kingdom during summer. June is the sunniest month of the year across England and Wales. While the average day-time temperature is 18-20°C, in recent years England has experienced heatwaves reaching up to 35°C.
This tour includes the use of audio headsets, which amplify the voice of your guide (despite noisy surroundings). This technology also allows you to move freely during site visits without missing any information.

Other considerations:

3- to 5-star hotels with four hotel changes; some hotels do not have in-room air-conditioning.
You must be able to carry your own hand luggage. Hotel porterage includes 1 piece of luggage per person.
A trip on the Snowdon Mountain Railway (Diesel Service: Summit return – Day 15).
It is important to remember that ASA programs are group tours, and slow walkers affect everyone in the group. As the group must move at the speed of the slowest member, the amount of time spent at a site may be reduced if group members cannot maintain a moderate walking pace. ASA tours should not present any problem for active people who can manage day-to-day walking and stair-climbing. However, if you have any doubts about your ability to manage on a program, please ask your ASA travel consultant whether this is a suitable tour for you.

Please note: it is a condition of travel that all participants agree to accept ASA’s directions in relation to their suitability to participate in activities undertaken on the tour, and that ASA retains the sole discretion to direct a tour participant to refrain from a particular activity on part of the tour. For further information please refer to the ASA Reservation Application Form.

National Trust Membership

It is a requirement that all travellers on this program have a current membership to the National Trust for the period of the tour. You will need to send a photocopy of your National Trust membership card to ASA prior to the start of the tour, and to carry your card with you throughout the tour program. Different types of National Trust membership are available (family, singles, etc) and the fees vary from state to state. For assistance in joining the National Trust and completing these formalities, please contact ASA.

Practical Information

Prior to departure, tour members will receive practical notes which include information on visa requirements, health, photography, weather, clothing and what to pack, custom regulations, bank hours, currency regulations, electrical appliances and food. The Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade website has advice for travellers: www.smartraveller.gov.au

 

Garden Masterpieces of England and the Chelsea Flower Show

Garden Masterpieces of England and the Chelsea Flower Show

 

 

**Waitlisted. Now accepting bookings for 2020. **

 

ITINERARY

 

The following itinerary describes a range of gardens and estates which we plan to visit. Many are accessible to the public, but others require special permission which may only be confirmed closer to the tour’s departure in 2019. The daily activities described in this itinerary may change or be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate alterations in opening hours, flight schedules and confirmation of private visits. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents prior to departure. Meals included in the tour price and are indicated in the itinerary where: B=breakfast, L=Lunch and D=evening meal.

 

 

Oxford – 5 nights

 

Day 1: Tuesday 14 May, London Heathrow – Oxford

Arrive London Heathrow and transfer to Oxford
Introduction & Welcome Dinner

On arrival at London Heathrow airport, those taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight transfer by private coach to Oxford, home to the oldest university in the English-speaking world. If you are travelling independently, you should meet the group at the MacDonald Randolph Hotel. This evening there will be a short introductory meeting before dining at a local restaurant. (Overnight Oxford) D

 

Day 2: Wednesday 15 May, The Cotswolds

Private visit of Sezincote House and Gardens
Market town of Moreton-in-Marsh
Guided tour of Bourton House Gardens with the Head Gardener, Paul Nicholls
Stow-on-the-Wold

Today we drive into the Cotswolds to visit two magnificent gardens located near the village of Moreton-in-Marsh. Our first visit is to Sezincote Manor, where an exotic oriental garden was created to complement the architect S.P. Cockerell’s fascinating 19th-century Regency house, which he designed in an Indian, Mogul style; Sezincote served as the inspiration for George IV’s Brighton Pavilion. Sezincote’s extraordinary eccentricities include a temple, not to any Grecian deity, but to the Hindu goddess Souriya; garden sculptures include a bronze serpent and Brahmin bulls, whilst minarets top the conservatory.

Midday we travel to the northern Cotswolds town of Moreton-in-Marsh, where there will be time at leisure for lunch and to explore the high street, which has many elegant 18th-century inns and houses, including the Redesdale Market Hall.

In the afternoon we continue to the nearby award-winning three-acre gardens of Bourton House. The gardens had become overgrown and neglected when Richard and Monique Paice acquired them in 1983. Over the past 25 years, the ornamental garden with its 18th-century raised walk overlooking the rolling Cotswold Hills, the original kitchen garden, and Bourton’s orchard, have been transformed. The Paices’ achievement was recognised when Bourton House Garden was honoured with the prestigious HHA/Christie’s ‘Garden of the Year’ award in 2006.

Our day concludes with a drive through the picturesque Cotswolds, including a short stop at the village of Stow-on-the-Wold. Stow-on-the-Wold was an important medieval market town and is now a centre for English antiques. As well as the large market square, the town has some very early coaching inns, including the Royalist Hotel that has timbers that have been carbon-dated to 987; it is believed to be the oldest inn in England. (Overnight Oxford) B

 

Day 3: Thursday 16 May, Oxford – Banbury – Lower Wardington – Oxford

Broughton Grange, Banbury
Pettifers Garden, Lower Wardington

We begin today with a visit to Broughton Grange, which has received much attention since opening under the National Garden Scheme (NGS) in 2004. The gardens are set in 350 acres of parkland, farmland, and open meadow, with a style of planting that owes its origins to the Victorian era. The gardens’ development accelerated in 2001, when acclaimed landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith, who has been awarded eight RHS Chelsea Flower Show gold medals including three Best in Show awards, was commissioned to transform a 6-acre field into a walled garden. This impressive new garden features three individually themed terraces and has been designed with consideration to the surrounding rural landscape. Broughton Grange now represents one of the most significant private contemporary gardens in Britain. Broughton Grange is the first of a selection of Tom Stuart-Smith gardens included in the tour. A ploughman’s lunch will be provided after our guided tour of the gardens.

After lunch, we explore the innovative Pettifers Gardens, where head gardener Polly Stevens will provide us with a guided tour. The tour will describe not only the interesting and surprising plant combinations, but also how this garden has undergone changes made by the owner and designer, the Honourable Mrs. Gina Price, since the early 1990s, when she began to design the garden. Combined with friendship and advice from Diany Binney at Kiftsgate Court Gardens, Pettifers has today developed a reputation as one of the must-see English country gardens. Adorned with herbaceous perennials, this garden is guaranteed to please in the peak of English summer. RHS judge and media personality James Alexander-Sinclair described the garden in Gardens Illustrated magazine as “undoubtedly one of the most exciting and delightful gardens in the country.”(Overnight Oxford) BL

 

Day 4: Friday 17 May, Oxford – Througham Court – Highgrove – Oxford

Private Guided tour of Througham Court Gardens with Dr Christine Facer Hoffman
Highgrove House: Lunch & Guided tour of Gardens (subject to confirmation in 2018)

We depart Oxford early this morning and travel 77 kilometres south to the county of Gloucestershire. Here, Througham Court, a 17th-century Jacobean house with 6 acres of formal/informal landscape overlooks a peaceful Cotswold valley. Christine Facer Hoffman, scientist and landscape architect, describes her private garden as “a personal ‘laboratory’ to experiment with new ideas, materials and planting combinations.” Developed since 2000, contemporary areas have been artfully embedded in the Cotswold architect Norman Jewson’s 1930s Arts and Crafts masterpiece, which features magnificent yew topiary and dry stone wall terracing. Hoffman has stated that her contemporary ‘fragments’ are inspired by scientific discoveries and theories. She uses mathematical number sequences found in nature to create a symbolic and metaphorical narrative so that the gardens may be ‘read’ by the visitor. They recently featured in the RHS publication The Garden magazine and in Alan Titchmarsh’s Garden Secrets on BBC 2.

Mid-morning we make the short drive to Doughton village, where Highgrove House, the country home of Their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, is located. The Prince purchased Highgrove in 1980, and has spent 30 years transforming its grounds into what have been acknowledged as some of the most brilliant and inventive gardens in the United Kingdom. “A series of interlinked areas, each with their own character and purpose, weave magically around the garden, with the house always visible in the distance. For the last 25 years the gardens and surrounding land have been managed to the organic and sustainable principles that His Royal Highness has for so long championed.” After lunch and our 2-hour guided tour of the gardens, we return to Oxford, where the evening is at leisure. (Overnight Oxford) BL

 

Day 5: Saturday 18 May, The Cotswolds

Hidcote Manor
Kiftsgate Court Gardens
Village of Bibury

Today we travel first to Chipping Campden and the delightful National Trust property, Hidcote Manor. Hidcote is significant for its influential garden, designed in the English Arts and Craft style by Major Laurence Johnston as a series of rooms of different character and theme, separated from each other by walls and hedges.

At midday we continue to Kiftsgate Court Gardens, which tell the story of three generations of women gardeners: Heather Muir, Diany Binny and Anne Chambers. Heather Muir created the gardens in the 1920s. From the mid-fifties Diany Binny added the semi-circular pool in the lower garden and redesigned the white sunk garden. One of the finest accomplishments of its current owner, Anne Chambers, is the new water garden whose composition is ‘abstract modern’.

Our day concludes with another drive through the Cotswolds visiting the village of Bibury, described by William Morris as ‘the most beautiful village in the Cotswolds’. (Overnight Oxford) BL

 

Day 6: Sunday 19 May, Oxford & Steeple Ashton

Rousham House and Gardens
Guided tour of the University of Oxford Botanic Gardens with Dr Alison Foster, Senior Curator
Magdalen College and its award-winning gardens

This morning we drive north of Oxford to Steeple Ashton to visit another stately home of very different aspect. Rousham House has remained the property of the Dormer family since its construction in 1635. The house retains much of its original panelling, staircases, furniture and art works. Several alterations were made in 1876 when the north side of the house was added, but for the most part Rousham remains a stunning example of 17th-century architecture and decoration. The gardens are of particular importance as they represent the first phase of English landscape design and have undergone few changes since being laid out by William Kent.

Following some time at leisure for lunch, we shall enjoy a walking tour of the magnificent University of Oxford Botanic Gardens with senior curator, Dr Alison Foster. Finally, we shall visit the award-winning gardens of 15th-century Magdalen College. Magdalen’s extensive grounds include its own deer park, wildflower meadow and a riverside walk. For Oscar Wilde, who matriculated at Magdalen in October 1874, ‘The Magdalen walks and cloisters’ were the ideal backdrop for reading Romantic poetry! (Overnight Oxford) B

 

 

Royal Tunbridge Wells – 1 night

 

Day 7: Monday 20 May, Oxford – West Green House Gardens – Sevenoaks – Royal Tunbridge Wells

West Green House Gardens: Lunch & Guided tour of Gardens
Ightham Mote, Sevenoaks

We depart Oxford early this morning and travel 60kms south to the Hart District of Northern Hampshire to visit West Green House Gardens that surround a lovely 18th-century house. These are the creation of an Australian, Marylyn Abbott. One could possibly call this a ‘biographical garden’ in the sense that it is a very personal creation based upon Marylyn’s early love of gardens, inculcated by her mother and grandmother when she was growing up in Australia (Marylyn masterminded the famous Australian garden, ‘Kennerton Green’). At West Green House she has reconciled her Australian gardening heritage, dominated by brilliant light, with England’s softer, more muted atmosphere. Marylyn is a prolific writer; her latest book The Resilient Garden, in keeping with her experience reconciling very different gardening environments, discusses a collection of plants that will acclimatise to both Mediterranean and cool temperate gardens. Her gardens appear in many publications, in one of which (The Royal Horticultural Society’s Garden Finder 2007) Charles Quest-Ritson has stated:

“West Green House Gardens has many original features. A grand water staircase provides the focal point to the Nymphaeum fountain designed by Quinlan Terry. By the house is a charming small topiary garden where water lilies flourish in small water tanks sunk in the ground. It runs up to a handsome aviary with unusual breeds of bantams and chickens. Beyond, are a dramatic new Persian water garden in a woodland glade, a newly restored lake, more follies and fancies, new walks and massive plantings of snowdrops, daffodils and fritillaries.”

Lavishness is a hallmark of the Abbott style – 10,000 tulip bulbs are planted every year – but Marylyn also emphasises the importance of drama, colour, innovation and humour in her garden.

Following a light lunch, we continue our journey east to Ightham Mote, a wonderful example of a small medieval moated manor house, perfectly located within a peaceful garden surrounded by woodland. Dating from the 14th century, this house has seen many changes but each subsequent section has been preserved in extraordinary condition. Medieval knights, courtiers to Henry VIII and high-society Victorians have all contributed sections to Ightham Mote. Highlights include the picturesque courtyard, Great Hall, crypt, Tudor painted ceiling, Grade I listed dog kennel and the private apartments of Charles Henry Robinson, who gave Ightham Mote to the National Trust in 1985. We shall walk to the house, enjoying its rural setting, before exploring its beautiful interior. Of special note is the chapel, with its perfectly preserved interior, pulpit and tester. We shall also enjoy the gardens, with an orchard, water features, lakes and woodland walks.

In the late afternoon we travel a short distance to Royal Tunbridge Wells, a town that rose to prominence when it became a spa in the late 17th century. Tonight we shall dine together at the hotel’s restaurant. (Overnight Royal Tunbridge Wells) BLD

 

 

London – 3 nights

 

Day 8: Tuesday 21 May, Royal Tunbridge Wells – Great Dixter – Sissinghurst – London

Great Dixter House & Gardens
Sissinghurst Castle Gardens

Today is a day of superb gardens. The Lloyd family developed Great Dixter early in the 20th century from an original design by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Today it is more famous for the plantings established by Christopher Lloyd documented in his many classic gardening books. The residence comprises a mid 15th-century hall house, typical of the Weald of Kent, to the south side of which a second, early 16th-century yeoman’s house was grafted. Lutyens enjoyed using local materials and retained farm buildings like oast houses, cowsheds, barns and outbuildings. Around these he designed his garden, featuring a sunken garden, topiary and yew hedges. Christopher Lloyd managed Great Dixter from the 1950s and was noted for his innovative approach and introduction of concepts like the mixed border and meadow garden, and his replacement of the rose garden with schemes using less fashionable plants like cannas and dahlias. We will investigate his full range of planting schemes. Although Lloyd is no longer present in the garden his gardener Fergus has achieved what some consider even better results in recent years.

We next drive to Sissinghurst Castle Garden, one of England’s greatest garden delights. Sissinghurst was the garden of poet and writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, journalist, MP and diplomat, and is possibly the most influential of all 20th-century gardens. Built around the remnants of an Elizabethan castle, of which the tower remains a central garden feature, the garden is divided into distinct spaces where a formality established by Nicolson is clothed by a romantic planting style pursued by Sackville-West. The garden retains its original charm and romance with such delights as its parterre, white garden, cottage garden, nut walk and orchard. We shall explore Sissinghurst’s many hidden corners, sumptuous planting combinations and the view from the top of the tower, always a good starting point for those who wish to understand the garden’s layout.

In the late afternoon we travel to London where we shall spend the next three nights at St Martins Lane hotel. (Overnight London) BL

 

Day 9: Wednesday 22 May, Chelsea Flower Show

The Chelsea Flower Show (Members Day)
The Garden Museum

Today is dedicated to the Chelsea Flower Show, the world’s best-known flower show. Located in the grounds of Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital (1689), the Show is held annually in May and attracts more tourists to London than the Wimbledon Championships! We will therefore arrive early in order to enjoy the remarkable displays before they become too crowded. All of the gardens on display are constructed in the two weeks prior to the show and, following the event, are dismantled and the grounds reinstated. Around the periphery of the grounds are display gardens, sponsored by newspapers and magazines, major stores and insurance companies, whilst inside the giant marquee are exhibits by plant growers. Here you will see perfect displays of everything horticultural from bonsai to bulbs, rhododendrons to roses. This visit has been designed so that you are free to wander through the event at your leisure, not forgetting the botanical art and floral displays. This is a visual feast that all gardeners will want to enjoy at least once in their lives!

In the mid afternoon we visit the nearby Garden Museum, which has recently been redeveloped and showcases an impressive collection and temporary exhibitions in its galleries. The museum, founded by Rosemary Nicholson in 1977, is housed in a former church and features a medieval tower with a view to Westminster. In what was formerly St Mary’s at Lambeth, this building dates back to the medieval era and is Britain’s only museum of garden history art and design. (Overnight London) B

 

Day 10: Thursday 23 May, London

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew – with Richard Barley, Director of Horticulture at Kew Gardens
Farewell Lunch at the Botanical Restaurant, Kew Gardens
Afternoon at leisure

Today is a unique opportunity to explore the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with Richard Barley, who was appointed Director of Horticulture at the Gardens in April 2013. With his knowledge based on the day-to-day management of the site, Richard will give deep insights into these world-renowned gardens. The original gardens were created for Augusta, Princess of Wales around her home, Kew Palace. Today it contains the largest collection of plants in the world with tropical and sub-tropical plants being kept in appropriate conditions in magnificent Victorian glasshouses. The variety of plants is overwhelming but Kew has a magic far above the ordinary run of Victorian plant collections, perhaps because of its size and the underlying but unobtrusive formality of its structure. The Queen’s Garden is a faithful copy of a 17th-century garden with parterres, sunken garden and pleached alleys. A new treetop walk by Marks Barfield Architects (who designed the London Eye) opened in May 2008.

Our day concludes with a farewell lunch at the Botanical Restaurant, housed in Museum No. 1 with stunning views to Palm Lake. The remainder of the afternoon is free for you to explore London at your leisure. (Overnight London) BL

 

Day 11: Friday 24 May, London, Tour Ends

Airport transfer for participants departing on the ASA ‘designated’ flight
The tour ends in London. Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer to the airport to take their flight home to Australia. Alternatively, you may wish to extend your stay in London. Please contact ASA if you require further assistance. B

 

A Taste of Tasmania: Spring Gardens, Cradle Mountain & Gourmet Delights

A Taste of Tasmania: Spring Gardens, Cradle Mountain & Gourmet Delights

 

ITINERARY:

The following itinerary describes a range of gardens and other sites which we plan to include. Some are accessible to the public, but others require special permission which may only be confirmed closer to the tour’s departure. The daily activities described in this itinerary may change or be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate alterations in opening hours, flight schedules and confirmation of private visits. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents prior to departure. The tour includes breakfast daily, lunches & evening meals indicated in the detailed itinerary: B=breakfast, L=lunch and D=evening meals.

Hobart – 4 nights

Day 1: Saturday 16 November, Arrive Hobart

Morning airport transfer for participants arriving on the ASA designated flight

Time at leisure (optional visit to the Salamanca Market)
Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens incl. the Tasmanian Community Food Garden
Welcome Drinks

Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ morning flight will be transferred from the airport to our heritage hotel, a 19th-century sandstone mansion, which is in the historic area of Battery Point and a short stroll from Salamanca Place’s Georgian warehouses that now house galleries and boutiques. Those taking alternative flights should meet the group ready for our afternoon tour.

On arrival there will be some time at leisure to explore Hobart’s colourful Saturday Salamanca Market as the hotel check in is 2.00pm.Salamanca Market is on the Hobart waterfront and is an eclectic mix of more than 300 stallholders. You can buy some locally produced fare for lunch, or dine in a nearby café, and it’s a great place to meet the artisans, watch buskers and soak up the atmosphere while you browse stalls with jewellery, handcrafted timber items, vintage collectables, pottery, plants and flowers.

Our program will officially commence this afternoon with a guided tour of the Royal Botanic Gardens, including the Tasmanian Community Food Garden which was completed in 2013 on the site of the original ‘Pete’s Patch’ developed by gardening guru Peter Cundall. This working organic production and display garden, with a multitude of veggie production practices has a working example of the original six-bed crop rotation system made famous in the original patch. The site today is used extensively for filming on ABC television’s Gardening Australia program.

We’ll visit the only place outside of the sub Antarctic where you can see the biodiversity of subantarctic plants from Macquarie Island and other subantarctic islands between Tasmania and Antarctica. The gardens also have collections of Tasmanian plants and noteworthy areas include the ‘Friends’ Mixed Border’ and the Japanese garden. We end the day with Welcome Drinks at the hotel. (Overnight Lenna of Hobart Hotel)

Day 2: Sunday 17 November, Hobart – Huon Valley – Glazier’s Bay – Hobart

Crawleighwood Nursery and Garden, Huon Valley
Long Table Lunch at Fat Pig Farm, Glazier’s Bay

Our first visit is to Crawleighwood, at Nicholls Rivulet in the Huon Valley. Here, Penny Wells and Pavel Rusicka have created a 2-hectare garden comprising rhododendrons, Japanese maples, woodland perennials, rainforest species and native Tasmanian plants. Crawleighwood contains at least one specimen of each Tasmanian conifer, including the iconic Huon pine.

Our sumptuous long table lunch will feature food grown at Fat Pig Farm in Glazier’s Bay, the home of chef Matthew Evans, former restaurant reviewer and presenter of the SBS show Gourmet Farmer. The show is filmed at the farm and between courses we’ll tour the 70-acre mixed farm which has a 1.7-acre market garden, rare Wessex saddleback pigs, beef cattle, beehives, fruit orchard and micro-dairy. (Overnight Lenna of Hobart Hotel) BL

Day 3: Monday 18 November, Hobart – Neika – Russell Falls – Hamilton – Hobart

Sally Johannsohn’s Garden & Nursery, Neika
Russell Falls, Mount Field National Park
Prospect Villa & Gardens, Hamilton

This morning we travel to Neika in the foothills of Mt Wellington, where plantswoman Sally Johannsohn has created a 2-acre, contemporary perennial garden to complement her nursery called Plant Hunters. Sally was ‘guest gardener’ at Chanticleer, one of America’s most imaginative and exciting public gardens in 2014 and since then has concentrated on succession planting, adding more bulbs and annuals to extend the flowering season. The garden has rich basalt soils supporting many unusual perennials and shrubs from Asia, North America’s woodlands and Europe, which show the beauty and variety of ornamental plants.

Next we drive to Russell Falls at Mount Field National Park which is part of Tasmania’s World Heritage Wilderness Area. Featured on Australia’s first stamp, Russell Falls consists of two vertical drops; the 20-minute return walk to the falls is on a good track and boardwalk through lovely rainforest. The walk passes through towering swamp gums and areas close to the falls are framed by stunning tall tree ferns. A light lunch can be purchased at the Waterfalls Café and Gallery.

At Prospect Villa, overlooking the village of Hamilton, Helen Poynder has spent more than 35 years creating two different gardens surrounding her sandstone home. The romantic English garden, divided by hedging, overflows with roses, clematis and delphiniums. It has a white garden, herbaceous border, urn garden, round garden, secret garden and long walk. On the hotter western side house is a formal Renaissance-style garden inspired by visits to Italy. In the late afternoon we return to Hobart for an evening at leisure. (Overnight Lenna of Hobart Hotel) B

Day 4: Tuesday 19 November, Hobart – New Norfolk – Derwent Valley – Hobart

Rosedown Gardens, New Norfolk
Sumptuous lunch at the Agrarian Kitchen, Farm & Orchard, Derwent Valley
Gardens of Corinda, Glebe

This morning we travel northwest to the region of New Norfolk, the residential heart of the Derwent Valley which has a rich history, quality produce and pretty rural scenery.

Hundreds of roses bloom at Rosedown Gardens, a 4.5-acre garden transformed from orchards and hopfields by Ian and Brenda Triffitt into a garden with an emphasis on roses. The garden is relaxed and romantic and surrounds a 1840s riverside cottage set against towering eucalypts. We’ll be wowed by gorgeous heritage, David Austin and Alister Clark roses which team with spring flowering perennials and shrubs. Hedged grass paths weave between specimen trees and vine-covered arbours and more roses and iris surround a big pond.

We’ll have a sumptuous paddock-to-plate lunch at the Agrarian Kitchen, a restaurant committed to reconnecting the kitchen with the land. The restaurant is on a 5-acre working farm with an extensive vegetable garden, orchard, berry patch and herb garden. Many heirloom plants are grown using organic principles and rare-breed Wessex Saddleback and Berkshire pigs, Barnevelder chickens, milking goats, a flock of geese and honeybees are also in residence.

Returning to Glebe, a suburb of Hobart, we visit the enchanting gardens of Corinda, which compliment the Italianate Victorian home built in 1880 by former Hobart lord mayor Alfred Crisp. The 1796 sqm property is divided into garden rooms with different effects, some are romantic and a little wild, others very formal with box hedges. The garden’s sculptural feel is created by hedges of pleached linden, espaliered fruit trees, a cobblestone courtyard and topiary animals. (Overnight Lenna of Hobart Hotel) BL

Launceston – 3 nights

Day 5: Wednesday 20 November, Hobart – MONA – Broadmarsh – Launceston

MONA – Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart
Weston Farm, near Broadmarsh

This morning we travel to the Berriedale Peninsula and the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), an art museum that is the antithesis of the traditional gallery. It was created to be shocking, educational and entertaining with the confronting themes of passion, death and decay explored in unflinching detail. The controversial artworks are all from the private collections of arty eccentric David Walsh, a mathematician and art collector who made his money perfecting algorithms that let him beat casinos and bookies at their own game. Like it or not, you’ll be talking about it for years.

Nearby is Weston Farm, a small family business specialising in exquisite Peony roses, award-winning extra virgin olive oil and fresh farm produce. Horticulturist-turned-farmer Richard Weston and his wife Belinda purchased the farm in 1992 and transformed a bare 5.3-hectare property, about 30 minutes north of Hobart, into a successful mixed enterprise. In 2012 Richard was awarded the prestigious 2012 Nuffield Scholarship sponsored by Impact Fertilisers and the Tasmanian Government to investigate white asparagus production for the gourmet market, and in 2016, Weston Farm won the Delicious Produce Awards for their Smoked Paprika.

Richard and Belinda will show us their beautiful working farm, where everything conforms to organic and sustainable farming practices. Beyond the house and vegetable garden is the olive grove and open fields of peonies which will be at their peak when we visit. Weston Farm has over 30 different varieties, colours and forms, varying from soft voluptuous double pinks, dramatic bright crimson, delicate single whites, antique semi double corals and everything in between.

We shall then enjoy a lunch in the garden and sample some of the fresh farm produce that the family grows for fine restaurants such as The Source at MONA and their own café, Pigeonhole, in Hobart.

In the late afternoon we continue our drive north to the Peppers Seaport Hotel in Launceston, a waterfront hotel built on a former dry dock at the confluence of the North Esk, South Esk and Tamar rivers. (Overnight Peppers Seaport Hotel, Launceston) BL

Day 6: Thursday 21 November, Launceston – Longford – Carrick – Glengarry – Launceston

Woolmers Estate, National Rose Garden of Australia, Longford
Hawthorn Villa, Carrick (subject to confirmation closer to the date)
Garden of Jodi Broomby, Tamar Valley, Glengarry

Today we begin with a visit to Woolmers, a World Heritage-listed convict site with rose gardens displaying all the recognised rose families and one of the finest collections of historic roses in the southern hemisphere. It also has a grand productive vegetable garden. The 82-hectare property, founded in 1817 by prominent grazier and member of parliament, Thomas Archer, includes a two-part manor house, coach house, extensive outbuildings and convict cottages.

Hawthorn Villa is a Victorian gothic revival property situated on a hill with views over the countryside and the Liffey River. Its two acres of parklike gardens include a National Trust Listed grove of magnificent sequoias that were thought to have been planted more than 150 years ago, predating the house. Nicole and Innes Pearce moved to the home in 2003 and have created the two-acre garden from scratch. Innes is a former landscaper and has reflected the home’s symmetry in the garden which has extensive use of clipped box hedging. Areas of the garden have a maturity that belies the actual age of the garden as some of the plants have been rescued and re-homed. There are almost 100 individual, old English-style topiaries and a 40-year-old wisteria is the centrepiece for the white garden, which includes white iris, pentstemons and foxgloves. The white theme is continued elsewhere with a white dovecote and doves.

This afternoon we visit the private gardens of Jodi Broomby, located in the Tamar Valley, a region of premium vineyards, scenic pastures and forests. Jodi Broomby is a dedicated plantswoman and when she isn’t milking cows, she spends all her free time in the garden and home nursery. She uses plants to create structure in her garden by layering them from tall shrubs at the back down to smaller plants at the front. Her roses include many David Austin varieties which she teams with favourites like species geraniums and delphiniums and less common perennials like sanguisorba and phuopsis, morina, Aquilegia rockii and verbascum. (Overnight Peppers Seaport Hotel, Launceston) BL

Day 7: Friday 22 November, Launceston – Lalla – Pipers River – Launceston

The Pear Walk Country Garden, Lalla
Lunch at Bay of Fires Winery, Pipers River
Karen Johnson’s Garden, Pipers River

Today we begin with a visit to The Pear Walk country garden in Lalla. Remarkable garden walks and arches, created in the early 1900s by Frank Walker, a Kew trained plantsman, are hallmarks of this historic garden. The garden has a fairytale ambience and the centrepiece is a 500-foot-long pear arch with 24 trees on each side, twenty feet apart. New trees have been planted to replace those that have succumbed to age. Rhododendrons, azaleas and bulbs bloom beneath the tree canopy. The owners are restoring the historic arbour walk, which has magnificent trees including the original tree fern, liriodendron and cypress. More recent features include a laburnum walk, climbing roses and parkland gardens.

Today we enjoy lunch and wine-tasting at the Bay of Fires Winery, which is nestled in lush towering woodlands along the banks of the Pipers River. The Pipers River farming area has emerged during the past decade as Tasmania’s premier wine-growing district. Although the industry is small and new by national standards, the wines produced within the region are acknowledged as among the best in Australia.

Landscape designer Karen Johnson is, for the first time, opening her own home garden which she has developed on a 100-acre property, with one kilometre of Pipers River frontage and views to Mt Arthur. She’ll show us how she created a home garden using a blend of native and exotic plants on a windy, hilltop site. She moved there in 2010 and lived in the shed while establishing gardens and building an architect-designed black steel and blackbutt timber home. She’ll share her thoughts on designing for a view, the marathon of river weed removal and revegetation, swap tips for building productive vegetable gardens and provide insights on the advantages of working with a garden designer. (Overnight Peppers Seaport Hotel, Launceston) BL

Cradle Mountain – 3 nights

Day 8: Saturday 23 November, Launceston – Westbury – Cradle Mountain

Culzean Gardens, Westbury
‘Devils@Cradle’ – Tasmanian Devils Sanctuary

We begin today with a visit to the Culzean Gardens (pronounced ‘cullane’), a 13-hectare property with almost 3 hectares of parklike gardens and a 3-acre lake fringed with thousands of iris. The home was built in 1840 and many significant driveway trees were planted in the 1870s. The property has hundreds of conifers and mature trees, rhododendrons and azaleas and hundreds of roses.

In the afternoon we continue our journey west to Cradle Mountain-Lake St. Clair National Park, an integral part of Tasmania’s World Heritage area. The region is characterised by rugged peaks, deep gorges, glacial lakes, heathlands, Button grass moors and ancient forest.

Following some time relaxing at our hotel, we’ll meet Tasmania’s most famous animal, the Tasmanian devil. They look cute and cuddly but have a ruffian personality. We’ll also learn about the devastating facial tumour disease threatening these Tassie natives. Our early evening visit allows us to observe the amazing night-time antics of these devils at feeding time. (Overnight Cradle Mountain Hotel) BLD

Day 9: Sunday 24 November, Cradle Mountain – Nietta – Cradle Mountai

Dove Lake Walk
Cruickshanks Lookout, Leven Canyon
Kaydale Lodge Gardens, Nietta

Early this morning our coach takes us to Dove Lake for a six-kilometre, two-hour walk around the lake. Much of the track, which is under the towering shadow of Cradle Mountain, is boarded for easy walking. We’ll see Glacier Rock and walk through the tranquil Ballroom Forest where myrtle-beech trees are festooned in moss. On our walk we’ll be on the lookout for Australia’s only cold-climate deciduous tree. Nothofagus gunnii is also known as tanglefoot as bushwalkers sometimes get caught in its twisted, ground-hugging branches. You’ll only find it in Tasmania! Note: If you prefer to sleep in you can take a leisurely half hour stroll along the walking track at the rear of our hotel.

We’ll return briefly to the hotel before setting out for Leven Canyon, Tasmania’s deepest limestone ravine. Here, a well-maintained track (20-minute return walk), takes us to Cruickshanks Lookout, which provides breathtaking views of the canyon floor 275 metres below (where the Leven River flows), and views of Black Bluff and the surrounding countryside.

Just north of Leven Canyon lies Kaydale, a 2-hectare garden, created by two garden-obsessed generations of the Crowden family. The four gardeners have their own interests and gardens include a grand rockery with a waterfall, one of Tasmania’s best collections of deciduous trees, a vegetable patch, a pear walk with 27 espaliered trees, woodlands garden with a stream and Japanese style zen garden with raked gravel and bonsai. Featured plants in November include peonies and waratah. (Overnight Cradle Mountain Hotel) BLD

Day 10: Monday 25 November, Cradle Mountain – Barrington – Mole Creek – Chudleigh – Cradle Mountain

Jennifer Stackhouse’s Garden, Barrington
Wychwood Garden, Mole Creek
Old WesleyDale, Mole Creek
Melita Honey Farm, Chudleigh

You’ll remember today as one of the best days you’ve ever spent touring gardens!

Jennifer Stackhouse is a renowned Australian garden writer, editor and author of several gardening books who will, for the first time, open her one-acre Barrington garden in Tasmania’s lush northwest to an interstate garden group. She moved there from NSW in July 2014, attracted by the timber Federation home set in an old garden with a small orchard and mature trees that had been lovingly planted and tended for 28 years by keen gardeners. The area she now calls home enjoys a cool climate with high rainfall and has rich red soil. We’ll be able to admire foxgloves, poppies, peonies, clematis, roses, rhododendrons and dogwoods, hear about the changes she has made and what it’s like making a ‘cool’ change.

Most people think that Wychwood is Tasmania’s finest garden and today you get to decide for yourself. Wychwood was nothing more than a paddock in 1991 and today mixes sweeping borders of rare perennials and heritage roses with an outstanding contemporary design unlike any other garden we visit. The garden is a work of art with inspired planning and use of materials and plants that ranges from subtle to surprising. The most talked about and photographed feature of the 1-hectare garden is a medieval turf labyrinth but you’ll also love the winding privet hedges, a heritage apple orchard with resident geese, birch copse, water features and woodland.

Old WesleyDale is a glorious English style garden that started in 2001, aided by a backdrop of mature trees and hawthorns from the 1940s that create hedges in the wider landscape. Features include a walled garden for vegetables, picking garden and glass house, a terrace garden and aviary, ha-ha walk, lake walk and an amazing sculptured elephant edge created from honeysuckle (Lonicera nitida) that will have you reaching for your secateurs once you get home!

Bees do much more than just pollinate and at Melita Honey Farm you can look into a glass-backed hive and see the queen bee laying eggs and the workers spinning the nectar into liquid gold! They produce 50 varieties of honey, nougat and 12 flavours of honey ice cream. How sweet is that! (Overnight Cradle Mountain Hotel) BLD

Day 11: Tuesday 26 November, Cradle Mountain – Longford – Launceston Airport

Brickendon – a World Heritage-listed Colonial Farm Village, Longford
Farewell Lunch at Josef Chromy Wines

Transfer to Launceston Airport (arrival approx. 1600hrs)
Brickendon, like Woolmers, was settled by William Archer, in 1824 and has been owned and farmed by the same family for over 180 years. Members of the fifth generation of Archers are now tending the gardens. We’ll see the convict buildings of the farm village and check out the roses, shrubs and some of the oldest trees in Australia including oaks, elms, pines, cedars, yews and lindens and gardens with cool climate specialty plants like old fashioned roses and clematis.

We conclude our tour with a farewell lunch at Josef Chromy Wines, set among old English gardens and stands of 100-year-old oak trees, and overlooking a picturesque lake and vineyard. Acclaimed as one of Australia’s top 10, the cellar door is housed in the original 1880s homestead. The restaurant matches the best local regional produce with award-winning cool climate wines. BL

Physical Endurance & Practical Information

Physical Rating

The number of flags is a guide to the degree of difficulty of ASA tours relative to each other (not to those of other tour companies). It is neither absolute nor literal. One flag is given to the least taxing tours, seven to the most. Flags are allocated, above all, according to the amount of walking and standing each tour involves. Nevertheless, all ASA tours require that participants have a good degree of fitness enabling 2-3 hours walking or 1-1.5 hours standing still on any given site visit or excursion. Many sites are accessed by climbing slopes or steps and have uneven terrain.

This 11-day Cultural Garden Tour of Tasmania involves:

  • A moderate amount of walking mainly during outdoor site visits, often up and down hills and/or flights of stairs and uneven terrain
  • A moderate amount of coach travel, several on winding mountainous roads
  • The daily schedule generally involves an early-morning departure (between 8.00-8.30am), concluding in the late afternoon (between 5.00-5.30pm)
  • 4-star hotels with 2 hotel changes
  • You must be able to carry your own hand luggage. Hotel porterage only includes 1 piece of luggage per person.
  • It is important to remember that ASA programs are group tours, and slow walkers affect everyone in the group. As the group must move at the speed of the slowest member, the amount of time spent at a site may be reduced if group members cannot maintain a moderate walking pace.
  • ASA tours should not present any problem for active people who can manage day-to-day walking and stair-climbing. However, if you have any doubts about your ability to manage on a program, please ask your ASA travel consultant whether this is a suitable tour for you.

Please note: it is a condition of travel that all participants agree to accept ASA’s directions in relation to their suitability to participate in activities undertaken on the tour, and that ASA retains the sole discretion to direct a tour participant to refrain from a particular activity on part of the tour. For further information please refer to the ASA Reservation Application Form.

Practical Information

Prior to departure, tour members will receive practical notes which include information on weather, clothing and what to pack.

Great Castles, Country Houses & Gardens of Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Wales

Great Castles, Country Houses & Gardens of Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Wales

 

The following itinerary describes a range of castles, country houses, museums and other sites which we plan to include. Many are accessible to the public, but others require special permission which may only be confirmed closer to the tour’s departure. The daily activities described in this itinerary may change or be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate alterations in opening hours, flight schedules and confirmation of private visits. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents prior to departure. The tour includes breakfast daily, lunches & evening meals indicated in the detailed itinerary where: B=breakfast, L=lunch and D=evening meal.

 

ITINERARY

 

York, Yorkshire – 6 nights

 

Day 1: Tuesday 28 May, Manchester Airport – Adel – York

 

Arrive Manchester Airport and transfer to Leeds
York Gate Garden: Guided tour of gardens and afternoon tea
Light (2-course) evening meal

Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight are scheduled to arrive into Manchester Airport around midday. Upon arrival we transfer by private coach to York, where we spend the next six nights. Those taking alternative flights should meet the group at the Manchester Airport Arrivals Hall – please contact ASA to arrange a suitable meeting time.

En route to York we visit the highly innovative ‘paradise’ garden of York Gate, a one-acre garden tucked away behind the ancient church in Adel, on the northern outskirts of Leeds. Created by the Spencer family during the second half of the 20th century, and in 1994 bequeathed to Perennial, the Gardeners’ Royal Benevolent Society (founded 1839), it is a garden of extraordinary style and craftsmanship, widely recognised as one of the most innovative small gardens of the period. The garden is divided by yew and beech hedges into a series of smaller gardens, each with its own theme and style. From the formality of the herb garden with its topiary, to the dell with its half-hidden pathways and stream, every area has an intimacy and charm of its own. Traditional materials are used with creativity and invention. From pretty paths to pergolas, detailing throughout is exquisite. Evergreens, clipped into strong architectural shapes, are used to spectacular effect throughout the garden. Tonight we enjoy a light (2-course) evening meal at our hotel. (Overnight York) D

 

Day 2: Wednesday 29 May, York – Harewood – Harrogate – York

 

Harewood House: Private tour, Thomas Chippendale and the Watercolours Collection
Spa Town of Harrogate
Evening Welcome Reception at Fairfax House (Exclusive private visit, to be confirmed in 2018)

This morning we travel through West Yorkshire to Harewood House. There we embark on a private tour of one of England’s greatest country houses, boasting architecture by John Carr (1772) and Charles Barry (1843), magnificent interiors by Adam, furniture by Thomas Chippendale, and a park designed by ‘Capability’ Brown. A particular focus of our tour will be the highly regarded watercolour painting collection.

We next visit the old spa town of Harrogate. Prior to the discovery of its iron- and sulphur-rich waters, Harrogate comprised two minor villages (High Harrogate and Low Harrogate), situated close to the historic town of Knaresborough. Harrogate’s first mineral spring was discovered in 1571 by William Slingsby, who found that water from the Tewitt Well possessed similar properties to that of the springs of the Belgian town of Spa (which gave its name to spa towns). The medicinal properties of Harrogate’s waters were widely publicised by one Edmund Deane, whose book Spadacrene Anglica, or The English Spa Fountain, was published in 1626 and Harrogate consequently developed considerable fame as a spa town.

This evening we walk from our hotel to Fairfax House, one of the finest Georgian houses in England. Here we enjoy the ambience of the house with beverages and canapés in a private reception, then take an exclusive tour of the house. (Overnight York) B

 

Day 3: Thursday 30 May, York

 

Guided Walking Tour of York, including York Minster
Afternoon at leisure

This morning we will take a walking tour of the historic centre of York. This vibrant city was founded by the Romans in 71AD. As Eboracum it was an important town in the Empire’s north and in 208 the entire Roman world was governed from here. After being virtually abandoned following the fall of the Roman Empire and the withdrawal of the army, the town saw a period of population by the Anglo Saxons. York was first invaded by the Viking army on 1 November 866 and a new era began. After a short period of invasion and conquest, the Vikings chose to settle in York (which they called Jorvik) rather than return to Scandinavia. Archaeological excavations have revealed a wealth of evidence of the successful metal-based industries that were developed here, as well as the city’s role in trade. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, York was second only to London in size and prosperity.

The next chapter in the city’s history is Norman, when William the Conqueror marched on York intent on making this wealthy town part of his kingdom. He established a garrison here and built two castles to control access to the town from the River Ouse. There was considerable resistance to the Norman occupation of the town, with attempts to overthrow the new power. This was brutally suppressed in what is known as the ‘Harrying of the North’, when William extracted his vengeance on the population and many thousands died in a period of violence and famine, whilst the lively Viking city was systematically destroyed. The Normans rebuilt York and it is to this period a number of the city’s churches belong.

The medieval period was a Golden Age for York, when the town was a centre of trade and religion. However, following the War of the Roses and the defeat of Richard III to Henry Tudor, the city underwent another period of decline. The Reformation had a tremendous impact on York and its many churches and important religious houses which operated schools, hospitals, hospices and employed local citizens. The Dissolution of the Monasteries left a large hole in the finances of the city, and many religious buildings fell into disrepair. Elizabethan York saw a return to prosperity which continued until the Civil War, when the city was used as a Royalist stronghold and was besieged by the Parliamentarian army. Once again, the religious and business focus of the town allowed it to rise again to regional prominence, and the Industrial Revolution brought new business opportunities to the region.

The Georgian period coincided with a building boom and York now boasts many fine Georgian mansions. Our guide will point out the many layers of the city’s rich history that can be seen in the buildings, roads, walls and churches.

Our walking tour includes a visit to York Minster, one of England’s greatest cathedrals, which has a long, intricate history. The present building, which has the finest medieval stained glass in England, had a number of precursors. In 1069, for example, the Normans destroyed the Anglo-Saxon cathedral and so in 1080 its Archbishop, Thomas, began a new cathedral that was completed in 1100. In 1137 its east end was destroyed by fire. A new Romanesque choir was built in 1175, a south transept added in 1220, and the north transept completed in 1253. In 1394 the present choir was begun, and the foundations of the Lady Chapel laid in 1361. In 1338, the Great West Window was completed. The Great East Window followed in 1405, and the Minster, now completed, was consecrated in 1472. Meanwhile, the Minster’s original west towers had collapsed. The Minster became caught up in the Reformation – Thomas Wolsey was archbishop here – and in the Civil War, York remained a centre of Catholicism in England. 18th-century damage by fire and 19th-century restoration further modified this great building. Major restoration occurred again after another fire in 1984; in consequence York University has become one of England’s most important architectural conservation centres.

After the conclusion of our visit to York Minster the remainder of the day is free to explore York further, at leisure. (Overnight York) B

 

Day 4: Friday 31 May, York – Fountains Abbey – Newby Hall – York

 

Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal: Tour of Cistercian Abbey & Georgian Water Garden
Church of St Mary
Church of Christ the Consoler
Newby Hall & Gardens

Today we visit England’s largest ruined monastery, Fountains Abbey, situated in the beautiful Skell river valley, in which the 18th-century water garden of Studley Royal is also located. The view of the Abbey from the cliff above Studley Royal became a definitive instance of the ‘Picturesque’: a ruined Gothic abbey, evoking an ancient, pious culture, seen from a ‘modern’ 18th-century site. Flanked by two vast lawns set against awe-inspiring cliff faces, with the Skell running under its buildings, the Abbey is a masterpiece of 12th-century building ingenuity. Our tour of the site will take in spaces like the cellarium in which the lay brothers ate and slept; it retains much of its sophisticated vaulting.

In 1132 Fountains was founded in its isolated valley by Thurston, Archbishop of York, for a community that wished to return to a strict form of Benedictine rule; isolation being an ideal of medieval monasticism. The valley was sheltered from the weather and had clean water, plentiful wood, and building stone of high quality. The Abbey subsequently came under reforming Cistercian rule. The Cistercians followed a rigorous daily regime, committed to long periods of silence and a subsistence diet. They wore habits of coarse un-dyed sheep’s wool that earned them the name ‘White Monks’. After Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries (1536-40), glass and lead from Fountains found their way to Ripon and York. Its buildings and parts of its estate were sold to Sir Richard Gresham, whose family subsequently sold them to Stephen Proctor, the builder of Fountains Hall. In 1767 the ruins were sold for £18,000 to William Aislabie, creator of Studley Royal.

The Aislabie family created Studley Royal Water Garden in a wild and well-wooded part of the valley. Its formal, geometric design and its extraordinary vistas constitute a very imaginative, free and individualistic interpretation of French formal garden tradition. Ground level views emphasise its sweeping horizontality, relieved by fabriques and the kind of statues favoured by Grand Tourists to Rome; from higher up the garden’s complex structure reveals itself. Fabriques include the Neoclassical Temple of Piety (dedicated to Hercules), a rusticated Banqueting House, a Gothic octagon tower and a Temple of Fame, and a rotunda with wonderful views across the garden where 18th-century visitors picnicked. Other garden features include the Rustic Bridge, Hermit’s Grotto, Half Moon Pond, Cascades, Canal, Fishing Tabernacles, Drum Fall and the Seven Bridges Valley in the Deer Park. Our garden tour climaxes at the end of the High Ride at ‘The Surprise View’, also called ‘Anne Boleyn’s Seat’, because of a headless statue to be seen there! It gives a magnificent panorama of the distant Abbey ruins.

Returning from the end of the water gardens we climb a path through the fields to William Burges’ St Mary’s Church, one of Britain’s finest Gothic Revival churches. From outside its chancel you can see all the way to Ripon Cathedral.

We next tour the house and gardens at Newby Hall, one of England’s renowned Adam houses; its exceptional interior decoration and fine Neoclassical sculpture collection represent the epitome of 18th-century taste. Built in the 1690s in the style of Sir Christopher Wren, it was later enlarged and transformed by John Carr and subsequently by Robert Adam. It was the home of the Compton family and much of its superb collection was acquired on a Grand Tour by a Compton ancestor, William Weddell. The collection includes tapestries in the magnificent Gobelins Tapestry Room, a renowned gallery of classical statuary, and some of Chippendale’s finest furniture. Its glorious garden was designed in the 1920s by Major Edward Compton, who was strongly influenced by the garden of Hidcote. Newby Hall’s garden has many rare plants, including the National Collection of Cornus (Dogwood). It is famed for its main axis of double herbaceous borders, amongst the longest in Europe. Flanking this axis are numerous formal, compartmented gardens including a Rose Garden, a Water Garden, Autumn Garden and even a Tropical Garden. (Overnight York) BL

 

Day 5: Saturday 1 June, York – Castle Howard – Thirsk – Markenfield

 

Hall – York
Castle Howard: Private Guided tour of house & morning tea
Market Town of Thirsk, the Darrowby of the late James Herriot
Markenfield Hall

This morning we will have a private tour of a masterpiece of the Baroque, one of England’s greatest country houses, Castle Howard, the setting for the BBC series Brideshead Revisited. The 3rd Earl of Carlisle commissioned the ‘castle’ (a term often used for country mansions with no military purpose) from the gentleman-dilettante Sir John Vanbrugh, a fellow member of the famous Whig Kit-Cat Club. Nicholas Hawksmoor, architect of a number of Oxford colleges, assisted Vanbrugh here and at Blenheim. Vanbrugh designed a Baroque structure with two wings projecting symmetrically on either side of a north-south axis.

Castle Howard’s crowning central dome over the Great Hall, where we have a morning tea of homemade shortbread, was added as an afterthought. The East Wing and the east end of the Garden Front, the Central Block (including the dome), and the west end of the Garden Front all received exuberant Baroque decoration of coronets, cherubs and urns. Doric pilasters are on the north front and Corinthian on the south. Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, the Venetian Rococo painter, designed many of the house’s interiors when he was living in England between 1708 and 1713. Much of his painting was unfortunately destroyed in a fire in 1940. The house remained incomplete on the death of the 3rd Earl in 1738, and Vanbrugh’s design was never completed. The West Wing was designed in a Palladian style for the 4th Earl by Sir Thomas Robinson and was not completed until 1811. Much of the house, including the central dome, was destroyed by fire in 1940. Most of the devastated rooms were restored and the house was opened to the public in 1952.

Castle Howard has extensive and diverse gardens, including a large formal garden immediately behind the house. The house, flanked by two lakes, is prominently situated on a ridge, which was exploited to create a landscape garden that lies beyond the formal garden and merges with the surrounding park. Occupying this landscape are the Temple of the Four Winds at the end of the garden and the Mausoleum in the park. Castle Howard also has an arboretum called Ray Wood, and a walled garden that contains decorative rose and flower gardens. The garden architecture at Castle Howard also includes the ruined Pyramid, an Obelisk and several follies and other motifs in the form of fortifications. Another huge arboretum, called Kew at Castle Howard, was established in 1975 as a joint venture between Castle Howard and Kew Gardens. Managed by the Castle Howard Arboretum Trust, it has one of the most important collections of specimen trees in the United Kingdom.

Many of us grew up watching the television series All Creatures Great and Small and late this morning we travel to the bustling market town of Thirsk, where the stories originated. James Alfred Wight (James Herriot) moved to Thirsk to work as a country vet with Donald Sinclair in July 1940. Here there will be some time at leisure for lunch and to explore the town on a Saturday, which is Market Day.

Our day’s program concludes with a private tour of Markenfield Hall, a charming medieval moated manor house. The privately owned home is tucked away down a mile-long winding drive and is the most complete surviving example of a medium-sized 14th-century country house in England. The earliest part of the house dates to c.1230, while the main sections were built 1310-1325 for John de Markenfield, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Edward II, with further additions and alterations in the 16th, 18th and 19th centuries. The history of the home has always been deeply intertwined with the fortunes of Fountains Abbey and it was one of the most important centres of the 1569 ‘Rising of the North’. The house has been lovingly restored and in 2008 it was the first recipient of the Sotheby’s/Historic Houses Association Restoration Award, a prize that recognises the finest restoration of a historic house in Britain in a way which respects and is in sympathy with the age and quality of the building. (Overnight York) B

 

Day 6: Sunday 2 June, York – Scampston Estate – Mansion Cottage – Burton Agnes Hall – York

 

Walled Garden of Scampston Hall
Mansion Cottage
Burton Agnes Hall

We begin this morning by driving to Scampston Hall, situated in peaceful North Yorkshire, to visit its famous Walled Garden. Sir Charles and Lady Legard’s stunningly beautiful contemporary garden is quite unlike any other. Opened to the public for the first time in 2004, it has been received with great acclaim by visitors from all over the world. Set within the 18th-century walls of Scampston’s original kitchen garden, today the Walled Garden has an exciting and unashamedly modern feel to it and complements the adjacent 18th-century ‘Capability’ Brown park. The garden had been derelict for nearly fifty years before Sir Charles and Lady Legard undertook the huge task of renovating. Having adopted a traditional approach to the restoration of the house and park, they here produced a stunning garden with a contemporary feel with the help of leading garden designer, Piet Oudolf.

We next visit the small, private garden of Chris and Polly Myers’ Mansion Cottage. This hidden garden offers beautiful views and a tranquil atmosphere. Lush, vibrant perennial planting is highlighted with grasses; features include a globe garden, mini hosta walk, 100-foot border, summerhouse, vegetable plot, cuttery, bee and butterfly border, ponds, decking areas and lawns.

Having visited two contemporary gardens we now travel back in time to visit Burton Agnes Hall, an exquisite Elizabethan house filled with fine art, furniture, porcelain and impressionist and modern paintings. Fifteen generations have filled the Hall with treasures over five centuries, from magnificent carvings commissioned when the Hall was built to French Impressionist paintings, contemporary furniture, tapestries and other modern artwork. Lawns and topiary bushes surround the Hall and its gardens contain a maze, giant games, a jungle garden, and more than four thousand plant species. Burton Agnes Hall’s walled garden won the Historic Houses Association and Christies’ Garden of the Year Award 2005. We shall be given a guided tour of this beautiful property before returning to York. (Overnight York) BL

 

Buxton, Derbyshire – 4 nights

 

Day 7: Monday 3 June, York – Renishaw Hall – Haddon Hall – Buxton

 

Renishaw Hall: Private Literary Tour of the Sitwell family home & gardens (to be confirmed in 2018)
Bakewell
Haddon Hall

We depart York early this morning and travel south to Renishaw Hall, a country house in Derbyshire where the Sitwell family has lived in this ancestral home for nearly four centuries. On arrival we take a tour of Renishaw’s beautiful Italianate garden, park and lake, that were created by Sir George Sitwell, father of Osbert, Edith and Sacheverall. Sir George spent much of his life in Italy, where he had bought the huge former palace-villa of the Florentine Acciaiuoli family, Montegufoni. In England, he wanted to create an Italian garden in contrast to Gertrude Jekyll’s ‘colourful’ designs. The use of water, fountains, temples, cave and avenues adds effect and shelter for tender specimen plants.

The interior of Renishaw Hall, which features an antechamber designed by Edwin Lutyens, is graced with many Italian artworks and pieces of furniture collected by Sir George. The painting collection includes Salvator Rosa’s Belisarius in Disgrace, a painting that was once much appreciated by Benjamin Franklin. Our tour will have a literary focus, as Renishaw Hall is a house ‘built on books’, with a wide range of literary interests and connections over a period of almost 400 years. Each Sitwell generation has made its unique contribution to the literary legacy of the house and the family, particularly the famous ‘literary trio’ – Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. Our tour will follow the fortunes of the Sitwell family as wealthy book collectors in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and will include a special visit to the Renishaw Hall Library.

After free time for lunch in the small market town of Bakewell (famous for its pudding) we continue our tour of Derbyshire with a visit to Haddon Hall, arguably the finest example of a fortified medieval manor house in existence, and dating mostly from the 14th and 15th centuries. Originally owned by the descendants of William the Conqueror’s illegitimate son, Peverel, it was passed through marriage to the Manners family, later to become Dukes of Rutland, in whose possession it has remained. Haddon Hall affords a wonderful glimpse of English Early Modern country house design, because it remained closed and empty for two hundred years after the Dukes of Rutland moved to Belvoir Castle in the 17th century. The 9th Duke of Rutland reopened it in the 1920s. Because the grounds had escaped transformation into a landscape garden it influenced Edwardian gardeners deeply; its series of 17th-century terraces were particularly important. It embodies a vision of ‘old England’ symbolised by the rambling roses growing over its old stone walls. These roses are quite superb (some are 80 years old), and also impressive are the delphinium beds. There are recreations of 17th century box-edged parterres or knots, and below there are wonderful river meadows with a small and large stone bridge, which feature prominently in the 2006 BBC TV dramatisation of Jane Eyre. The approach to the house has a wonderful topiary garden.

The house itself has sections from a number of periods from the late 12th century to c.1620. The Banqueting Hall is medieval, but the house is predominantly Elizabethan, its pride being the oak panelled Long Gallery; the diamond panes of the gallery’s many windows are set at different angles to facilitate the entry of daylight. It also has a magnificent collection of English, Flemish and French tapestries, remains of a larger collection lost in a 1925 fire. Most important are five early 17th century English tapestries that may have belonged to King Charles I. The chapel has medieval frescoes, and the house also has a fine painting by Rex Whistler (1933), the artist of Plas Newydd.

Next we continue our journey to the elegant spa town of Buxton, which will be our base for the next four nights. Our hotel, built in 1550 by the Earl of Shrewsbury, the 4th husband of formidable Bess of Hardwick, is reputedly the oldest in England and has hosted during its long history such luminaries as Mary, Queen of Scots and Daniel Defoe. It is located in the centre of the town opposite one of the most exquisite Edwardian opera houses in the British Isles. (Overnight Buxton) B

 

Day 8: Tuesday 4 June, Buxton – Peak District – Castleton – Lyme Park – Buxton

 

White Peak District
Castleton Village, Peak District National Park
Lyme Park, House & Garden
Lecture by Sir Richard FitzHerbert: ‘Country Houses of Derbyshire’

This morning we enjoy the stunning and diverse scenery of Britain’s first designated national park, the Peak District National Park (1951). The Peak District is situated at the southern end of the Pennines in Central England and covers most of northern Derbyshire as well as parts of Cheshire, Yorkshire and Staffordshire. It has been prominent in numerous movies and TV dramas, including the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. A local guide will point out some of the locations used during filming whilst introducing Derbyshire’s bustling market towns, villages, and showing us its hills, dales and rivers.

Following lunch in Castleton, one of the most beautiful villages in the Peak District, we visit Lyme Park, the largest house in Cheshire. A Tudor house transformed into an Italianate palace, it is famous for its role as ‘Pemberley’, Darcy’s home, in the BBC’s 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice. Aficionados of the series will recall the scene of Lizzy meeting the dripping figure of Mr Darcy following his dip in the lake! Thomas Legh, an intrepid explorer and collector who made a pioneering journey through Egypt and up the Nile in 1816, saved Lyme Park from ruin. An extremely wealthy young man, he set Lewis Wyatt the huge task of reviving this vast, outdated family home. Wyatt’s remodelling, although extremely thorough, in no way compromised the 17th-century character of Lyme Park. The saloon, with its magnificent rococo ceiling and Grinling Gibbons-carved wood decorations, speaks amply of his sensitive approach.

This evening we are joined by Sir Richard FitzHerbert, who inherited Tissington Hall and the Estate from his uncle, the late Sir John FitzHerbert, at the age of 24 in 1989. Sir Richard will provide an illustrated lecture entitled ‘Country Houses of Derbyshire’. (Overnight Buxton) BL

 

Day 9: Wednesday 5 June, Buxton – Tissington Hall – Chatsworth House – Buxton

 

Tissington Hall & Gardens
Tissington Village & Norman Church of St Mary
Chatsworth House: one of the grandest Whig country houses (to be confirmed in 2018)

This morning we journey into Derbyshire to Tissington Hall, a beautiful Jacobean mansion where eight generations of the FitzHerbert family have lived. Tissington presides over a quintessentially English village, complete with duck pond and village green. This is one of the few remaining privately owned villages left in Britain. As it has no road markings or street lighting it is often used for filming period pieces, such as the BBC’s Jane Eyre (2006) and The Duchess (2007). We will take a guided tour of the hall and its gardens, as well as the village and the Norman Church of St Mary.

This afternoon we visit Chatsworth House, one of the grandest Whig country houses, situated in a spectacular landscape in the heart of the Peak District. It is the home of the 12th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, of the Cavendish family. The late Duchess, born Deborah Mitford (Debo) (1920-2014), the youngest of the famous Mitford sisters, revived the economy of the estate after it had been almost destroyed by death duties following the death of the 10th Duke in 1950 (the Chatsworth Settlement). The core of the house is from 1552, but its great days date from the 1690s, after the 4th Earl of Devonshire was created 1st Duke in 1694 for his part in the Glorious Revolution (1688). Generations of prominent Whigs followed and so Chatsworth represents the first phase of the great Whig country house (Stowe represents the second). The 1st Duke rebuilt the old house in stages, adding its fine Baroque façades, and it was substantially complete by 1707. The Painted Hall, whose ceilings and walls carry scenes of the life of Julius Caesar (1692-94) by Louis Laguerre, leads to a grand staircase. The State Apartments are the most important late Baroque presentation rooms in England, with ceilings by Laguerre and Mortlake tapestries made from Raphael’s tapestry cartoons now in the Victoria & Albert Museum. The chapel, designed by Cibber, is equally impressive, with illusionistic paintings by Laguerre and woodcarvings by Grinling Gibbons.

Chatsworth’s late Baroque gardens, like almost all great English Baroque gardens, were swept away when the 4th Duke commissioned Capability Brown to replace them (1760s). One survival is an Italianate cascade designed in 1696 by Grillet, a pupil of Le Nôtre. Thomas Archer, arguably the English architect who best understood the Italian Baroque, added the Temple or Cascade House above it in 1703. In the 19th century Joseph Paxton, the 6th Duke’s gardener, created a great glasshouse for exotic specimens; its revolutionary design led to his architectural triumph, London’s Crystal Palace. Paxton also built the Emperor fountain, whose jet rises 280 feet, and a vast rock garden. Newer additions to the garden include a serpentine hedge. (Overnight Buxton) B

 

Day 10: Thursday 6 June, Buxton – Quarry Bank – Buxton – Baslow Hall – Buxton

 

Quarry Bank Mill & Styal Estate
Walking Tour of Buxton, followed by time at leisure
Group Dinner at Fischer’s, Baslow Hall

This morning we drive to Quarry Bank Mill, a rare Georgian cotton mill that is both one of Britain’s most important industrial heritage sites as well as a working mill that produces over 9000m (10,000 yards) of cloth each year. Founded in 1784 by a young textile merchant, Samuel Greg, Quarry Bank Mill was one of the first generation of water-powered cotton spinning mills. By the 1830s Samuel Greg & Co. was one of the largest cotton manufacturing businesses in Britain with four other mills as well as Quarry Bank.

This mill reflects the earliest phase of the industrialisation of England, when manufacturing had not yet moved to great industrial cities, but rather occurred where water was plentiful. Such early industrial complexes often are built in a fine, simple architectural style not unlike some of the earliest colonial architecture in Australia. Our visit here offers a unique opportunity to see the two major sources of power available during the Industrial Revolution. The most powerful working waterwheel in Britain illustrates how power can be harnessed to drive machinery. A Boulton and Watt type beam engine (c.1830) and an 1880s Horizontal Engine powered by steam bring the past to life. Chief Engineer Barry Cook will be on hand to explain how everything operates. Time permitting, we also visit the three-hectare (8-acre) ‘Secret Garden’, the Greg family’s lovely, picturesque valley retreat adjoining the mill. Recently restored, it has now been opened to the public for the first time.

We return to Buxton for a short walking tour of the town, followed by time at leisure to continue exploring. Tonight we dine at Fischer’s Restaurant at Baslow Hall. The Michelin-starred dining room serves classical dishes created with balance and finesse, using the very best of fresh local and regional produce. The setting within a charming manor house further enhances this very special dining experience. (Overnight Buxton) BD

 

Chester, Cheshire – 3 nights

 

Day 11: Friday 7 June, Buxton – Little Moreton – Biddulph Grange Garden – Chester

 

Little Moreton Hall
Biddulph Grange Garden: Private guided tour of this amazing Victorian Garden

This morning we drive to Little Moreton Hall for a guided tour of one of Britain’s finest timber-framed, moated Tudor manor houses, which featured in David Dimbleby’s How we built Britain documentary (2007). Of particular importance is its magnificent Long Gallery that has unusual plasterwork. Its grounds feature a delightful knot garden.

This afternoon we take a private tour of Biddulph Grange Gardens. Biddulph is a treasure trove of 19th-century eccentricities and a rare surviving example of a High Victorian garden. Our private guided tour of the garden, to be opened specially for our group, leads us down tunnels and pathways taking us on a miniature tour of the world, with rare and exotic plantings and picturesque garden architecture, such as an Egyptian court and elegant Italian terraces. There is a unique Chinese garden with a temple enclosed within its own Great Wall of China. Some of the more eccentric features of the garden are an upside-down tree and strange stone sculpture. Biddulph also has an unusual geological gallery where the garden’s creator, James Bateman, showed his fossil and geological collection. It was arranged to correspond with the seven days of creation in the Genesis story and is contemporaneous with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859), a seminal work in scientific literature and a pivotal work in evolutionary biology.

We next drive a short distance to the city of Chester, lying on the River Dee, close to the border of Wales. (Overnight Chester) B

 

Day 12: Saturday 8 June, Chester

 

Walking Tour of Chester
Guided Tour of Chester Cathedral
Afternoon at leisure

A Roman legion founded Chester on the Dee River in the 1st century A.D. It reached its pinnacle as a bustling port in the 13th and 14th centuries but declined following the gradual silting up of the river. While other walls of medieval cities of England were either torn down or badly fragmented, Chester still has 3 kilometres of fortified city walls intact. The main entrance into Chester is Eastgate, which dates only from the 18th century. Within the walls are half-timbered houses and shops, though not all of them date from Tudor days. Chester is unusual in that some of its builders used black-and-white timbered facades even during the Georgian and Victorian eras.

This morning we take an orientation tour of this interesting medieval city, followed by a visit to Chester Cathedral. The present building, founded in 1092 as a Benedictine abbey, was made an Anglican cathedral church in 1541. Many architectural restorations were carried out in the 19th century, but older parts have been preserved. Notable features include the fine range of monastic buildings, particularly the cloisters and refectory, the chapter house, and the superb medieval woodcarving in the choir (especially the misericords). Also worth seeing are the long south transept with its various chapels, the consistory court, and the medieval roof bosses in the Lady Chapel.

The afternoon is free for you to further explore Chester at leisure. (Overnight Chester) B

 

Day 13: Sunday 9 June, Chester – Liverpool – Chester

 

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Time at leisure at Liverpool’s refurbished Albert Dock
The Beatles sites: Penny Lane, Strawberry Field, Mendips and 20 Forthlin Road (exteriors)

Liverpool, with its famous waterfront on the River Mersey, is a great shipping port and industrial center and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. King John launched Liverpool on its road to glory when he granted it a charter in 1207. Before that, it had been a tiny 12th-century fishing village, but it quickly became a port for shipping men and materials to Ireland. In the 18th century, it grew to prominence because of the sugar, spice, and tobacco trade with the Americans. By the time Victoria came to the throne, Liverpool had become Britain’s biggest commercial seaport.

This morning we drive to Liverpool to visit the Walker Art Gallery, opened in 1877. Here, we focus on its Pre-Raphaelite collection and its Victorian sculpture. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in London in 1848, consisted of seven young artists dedicated to the revival of styles that preceded the High Renaissance: John Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Collinson, F G Stephens, Thomas Woolmer and William Michael Rossetti. Liverpool was the only provincial city with its own Pre-Raphaelite school (The Liverpool Academy). The Walker Art Gallery collection includes Rossetti’s Dante’s Dream (1871), Millais’ Isabella, Holman Hunt’s Triumph of the Innocents and one of the world’s finest corpora of Victorian sculpture.

We take a short walk to Liverpool’s recently refurbished Albert Dock, where there will be time at leisure to explore this precinct. Albert Dock features a number of museums, including the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the award-winning ‘Beatle Story’ and numerous restaurants and cafés. In your leisure time you may wish to visit the Tate Liverpool, which displays much of the National Collection of 20th-century art, complemented by changing art exhibitions of international standing such as the prints of Joan Miró or the sculptures of the iconoclastic British sculptress Rachel Whiteread.

Before returning to Chester we make a short tour to view a number of the sites associated with the Beatles including Penny Lane, Strawberry Field and the childhood homes of John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney. (Overnight Chester) B

 

Portmeirion, Wales – 3 nights

 

Day 14: Monday 10 June, Chester – Erddig Hall – Powis Castle – Portmeirion

 

Erddig Hall: private tour of house
Powis Castle and Garden
Dinner at Hotel Portmeirion

Early this morning we depart Chester and cross into Wales for a private tour of Erddig Hall. Located on the outskirts of Wrexham, Erddig is one of the finest and evocative country houses in Britain, reflecting the upstairs-downstairs life of a gentry family over 250 years. Mainly of the 18th century, it has fine furniture, textiles and wallpaper. The servants’ quarters are particularly well preserved.

We continue south to Powis Castle and have lunch here on arrival. Powis, a 13th-century border castle, features the rare 17th-century Baroque garden of William Herbert, first Marquess of Powis. Herbert, a Roman Catholic, went into exile with James II after the Glorious Revolution (1688). In 1703 the Herberts returned from exile, their taste shaped by great French gardens such as St Germain-en-Laye, where the Stuart court was located. This put them out of step with new directions in Whig landscape gardening. Their grand Baroque terraces survive, with an extraordinary yew hedge, planted in 1720, that is now old and irregular in a way never intended when it was first established. Powis did not escape change entirely. A Dutch-style water garden laid out in 1705 in the flat meadows below the castle was swept away in the 1770s, and in part of this area an Edwardian formal garden was laid out in 1912. The Baroque terraces enjoy magnificent views. Against them are spectacular herbaceous borders by Graham Stuart Thomas and Jimmy Handcock. There are rich flower displays in vases on the edges of the terraces and in its niches. They are lined with lead statues by John van Nost, examples of the early 18th-century taste for picturesque Italianate rustic garden figures. In the castle courtyard stands a lead statue of Pegasus bearing aloft the personification of Fame, original centrepiece of the lost Dutch water garden. Van Nost’s pupil, Andries Carpentiére, based it on Antoine Coysevox’s group of Fame at Louis XIV’s palace at Marly. South and east of the castle is a Wilderness with a fine collection of trees and shrubs planted in the 20th century.

A Herbert family member married into the Clive family in the 18th century and their descendants own Powis today. Powis’ Clive Museum displays superb Indian treasures collected by family members, including Robert, ‘Clive of India’. The castle interior has a fine Baroque staircase (1674-1685) with a ceiling by Verrio, its walls painted in 1705 by his pupil Gerard Landscroon, who also painted the library. G.F. Bodley’s dining room with fine panelled walls and Jacobean plasterwork and his Oak Drawing Room are fine examples of Edwardian taste. A grand Baroque state bedroom (1665-1685) is the only one in Britain with a bed railed with a balustrade in the manner of Louis XIV’s Versailles. A superb T-shaped Elizabethan Long Gallery (1587-1595) has original plasterwork and chimneypieces. The castle’s sculpture collection includes marble busts of Roman emperors and a Roman statue of a cat playing with a snake that Robert Clive acquired in Rome. An interesting painting collection includes a fine view of Verona by Bernardo Bellotto.

From Powis Castle we cross the mountains, rising above the treeline, before descending into Gwynedd, an area in north-west Wales. We make our way to the resort village of Portmeirion, our base for the next three nights. Portmeirion is the creation of the flamboyant Arts and Crafts architect and garden designer Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978), a dedicated sailor who loved the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and, especially, Portofino, and decided to create his own version of them in Wales. In 1925 he bought a spectacular Snowdonian peninsula site not far from his family house at Plas Brondanw, overlooking an estuary that forms a vast sandy beach at low tide. On the cliffs above Portmeirion’s only pre-existing structure (now Hotel Portmeirion) he built a range of picturesque buildings and towers as a kind of village-hotel. Many writers, including Evelyn Waugh, lived and wrote here in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. These village houses surround a garden, forming a colourful, seaside version of Arts and Crafts taste. Many are tiny and are built using parts of demolished buildings. Clough later espoused a Romantic version of the Dutch 17th and 18th-century style. He was not afraid to create buildings in painted sheet metal, sometimes painted illusionistically to give a sense of relief, or to create buildings that had no other function than to look interesting: he built a domed building because he felt an Italianate coastal village should have one. Portmeiron also has interesting woodland walks, one of which takes you past a pet cemetery and ‘lighthouses’.

Williams-Ellis wanted to demonstrate that architecture could be both beautiful and fun but he was also a serious conservationist and town planner. He argued against uncontrolled suburban development (England and the Octopus), founded the Council for the Protection of Rural England, saved Stowe, and contributed to the planning of New Towns in post WWII Britain. His daughter created the Portmeirion pottery works, which is still run by the family. Tonight we enjoy a group dinner at Hotel Portmeirion. (Overnight Portmeirion) BLD

 

Day 15: Tuesday 11 June, Portmeirion – Caernarfon – Llanberis – Snowdonia National Park – Portmeirion

 

Caernarfon Castle: the greatest of the Edwardian Castles
Dolbardarn Castle (exterior only)
Snowdon Mountain Railway – excursion by diesel engine to summit
Dinner at Castell Deudraeth

This morning we head further north along the coast to reach Caernarfon, located at the southern end of the Menai Strait between north Wales and Anglesey. Caernarfon was considered a strategically excellent place to build a castle during Edward I’s invasions of Wales. Completed in 1330, the castle was built on a site that had once been a Roman fort and then a Norman motte and bailey; it was to become a symbol of English dominance in a region strong in Welsh tradition and anti-English feeling. To stamp his supremacy even further on the native population, Edward ensured that the birth of his son, the first English Prince of Wales, took place in the castle (1284) and the castle continues to be the setting for the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, the last being Prince Charles in 1969.

Following lunchtime at leisure, we view Dolbadarn Castle. Built for Llywelyn the Great in the 1230s, it features a massive round-towered keep. We then take the cogwheel railway train to the summit of Snowdon to enjoy the breathtaking views over the area. In the late afternoon we return to Portmeirion.

Tonight we dine at Castell Deudraeth, a Victorian castellated mansion Williams-Ellis bought from his uncle in 1931 with the intention of incorporating it into the Portmeirion hotel complex. The intervening war and subsequent building restrictions delayed its incorporation until 2001 when it was finally opened. Portmeirion is now owned by a charitable trust. (Overnight Portmeirion) BD

 

Day 16: Wednesday 12 June, Portmeirion – Harlech – Plas Brondanw – Portmeirion

 

Harlech Castle
Plas Brondanw Gardens
Afternoon at leisure in the village of Portmeirion

This morning we make a brief visit to Harlech Castle. Men of Harlech or The March of the Men of Harlech is a song and military march which is traditionally said to describe events during the longest siege in British history (1461-1468) which took place here during the War of the Roses. Edward’s tried and tested ‘walls within walls’ model was put together in super-fast time between 1283 and 1295 by an army of nearly a thousand skilled craftsmen and labourers. The structure boasts two rings of walls and towers, with an immensely strong east gatehouse. It was impregnable from almost every angle. Its secret weapon was a 200-foot (61m) long stairway which still leads from the castle to the cliff base. Access via the stairway to the sea and crucial supplies kept the castle’s besieged inhabitants fed and watered. When it was first built, a channel would have connected the castle and the sea. You could have sailed a boat up to the moat. Seven hundred years later, the sea has receded and you could say the castle appears almost stranded, waiting for the tide to turn once more.

Next we visit Plas Brondanw, the home of Clough Williams-Ellis between 1902 and 1960. It has one of the great Arts and Crafts gardens, noted for its structure of yew-hedged compartments. Inspired by stunning views of the mountains of Snowdonia, Clough cleverly ‘borrowed’ the peaks of the Snowdon and Cnight mountains visually by using the former to establish the chief axis of the garden, and revealing the latter through a window-opening cut in a hedge. Within the grounds of Plas Brondanw is Folly Castle, described on a plaque as ‘a wedding present from the Welsh Guards to Clough Williams-Ellis and Amabel Strachey in 1915. Located on a small hill, the folly affords good views of the surrounding landscape. It has featured in the film Inn of the Sixth Happiness and the Doctor Who film, The Five Doctors. We enjoy a light buffet-style lunch at Plas Brondanw before retuning to Portmeirion, where we have the afternoon and evening at leisure to explore the village and its beautiful gardens. (Overnight Portmeirion) BL

 

Bodysgallen Hall, Conwy, Wales – 3 nights

 

Day 17: Thursday 13 June, Portmeirion – Gwydir Castle – Bodnant Garden – Bodysgallen Hall

 

Gwydir Castle
Bodnant Garden
Gardens of Bodysgallen Hall
Dinner at Bodysgallen Hall

This morning we drive to Gwydir Castle beneath Carreg y Gwalch (Rock of the Falcon), the ancestral home of the powerful Wynn Family, descendants of the kings of Gwynedd, and one of the most significant families of North Wales during the Tudor and Stuart periods. The Castle is being sympathetically restored by the present owners, who will introduce us to their house and garden.

Following our tour of Gwydir Castle we travel to Bodnant Garden. Bodnant Garden occupies an 80-acre westward sloping site above the River Conwy that looks across the valley towards the Snowdonia range. Its spectacular garden was the inspired work of the second Lord Aberconway who in 1902, with his mother’s encouragement, conceived and constructed its great terraces and organised the mass planting of Chinese rhododendrons. Appointed in 1920, Bodnant’s head gardener, Frederick Puddle, undertook an extensive and successful rhododendron hybridising programme, a project continued until today by three generations of Aberconways and Puddles. It is the archetypal plantperson’s garden, where exotic species brought from China or the Himalayas were first cultivated in Britain.

The garden has two parts. The upper part surrounding the house consists of five Italianate terraces on which herbaceous borders surround informal shady lawns. Its most famous feature is the laburnum walk, a fifty-five metre long tunnel that becomes a mass of yellow blooms from late May to early June. Lower down is the Pin-Mill, a reconstructed garden folly. From here the ground drops away to a deep, damp valley, known as The Dell, along which rushes the river Hiraethlyn. Here, in the Pinetum and Wild Garden, grow Britain’s earliest plantings of the Metasequoia (Dawn Redwood), discovered only in the 1940s.

From Bodnant Garden we continue north to Bodysgallen Hall, which will be our base for the next 3 nights. Bodysgallen is a manor house in Conwy county borough, north Wales, near the village of Llanrhos. Since 2008 the house has been owned by the National Trust. We plan to arrive at the hall in time for you to enjoy a walk through the hall’s magnificent 200 acres of gardens before dinner. (Overnight Bodysgallen Hall) BD

 

Day 18: Friday 14 June, Bodysgallen Hall – Penrhyn Castle – Conwy – Bodysgallen Hall

 

Penrhyn Castle
Time at leisure in Conwy
Plas Mawr
Conwy Castle

This morning we journey along the coast to visit the enormous Penrhyn Castle, which sits beween Snowdonia and the Menai Strait. Built in 1820-35 in neo-Norman style, this is one of the most sumptuous country houses of its time. It features a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria, elaborate carvings, plasterwork and mock-Norman furniture. It also has an outstanding collection of paintings. The stable block houses a fascinating railway museum.

Midday we travel to Conwy, and following some time at leisure for lunch we visit Plas Mawr, possibly the best preserved Elizabethan town house in Great Britain. It was built by Robert Wynn between 1576 and 1585 and its interior has elaborately decorated plaster ceilings and fine wooden screens.

Castle Conwy, which, like Caernarfon, was constructed by Edward I between 1283 and 1289 as one of the key fortresses in his ‘iron ring’ of castles to contain the Welsh, dominates the town. A World Heritage site, Conwy has no concentric ‘walls within walls’ because they were not needed. Its massive military strength springs from the rock on which it stands and seems to grow naturally. Soaring curtain walls and eight huge round towers give the castle an intimidating presence undimmed by the passage of time.

This evening we are at leisure. You may wish to dine at Bodysgallen Hall, or perhaps take a short taxi ride (approx. 10 mins) to the seaside town of Llandudno. (Overnight Bodysgallen Hall) B

 

Day 19: Saturday 15 June, Bodysgallen Hall – Anglesey Island – Bodysgallen Hall

 

Plas Newydd House & Gardens
Bryn Celli Ddu Burial Chamber
Farewell Dinner at Bodysgallen Hall

This morning we depart Bodysgallen Hall for an excursion to the Isle of Anglesey. Here we visit the house and gardens at Plas Newydd. James Wyatt redesigned this elegant old home in the 18th century in a Gothic style and its 1930s interior is famous for its association with Rex Whistler. Like Williams-Ellis, Whistler belonged to that underrated strand of mid 20th-century British culture that looked to the past with gusto. Uninhibited by modernist theory, they did not hesitate to revive the great traditions of the past. In the dining room, Whistler created his masterpiece, a vast mural for the sixth Marquess of Anglesey. This mural, eighteen metres wide, was executed on one enormous piece of canvas that Whistler had made on a special French loom. Within an Arcadian and Romantic coastal landscape are romantic allusions to Whistler’s unrequited love for Lady Caroline, the beautiful eldest married daughter. On the painting’s left side is a depiction of Romeo and Juliet in which the young Whistler (Romeo) languishes beneath the balcony of Lady Caroline (Juliet).

The mild climate of the coastal setting of the gardens at Plas Newydd is ideal for many woody plants from warmer temperate regions of the world. While the bones of the garden were set out in the late 18th century by leading landscape gardener Humphrey Repton, much has changed in the intervening centuries. A long and broad sweep of lawn fringed and broken by trees to the west of the house is known as ‘the West Indies’, and at the end of the Long Walk you arrive at an arboretum known as ‘Australasia’ that features, among other things, a collection of eucalyptus, added in the 20th century. A wild and exotic wood of rhododendrons was established in the 1930s by the sixth Marquess and added to by the ‘thinnings’ sent from Lord Aberconway of Bodnant as a wedding present to Lord Anglesey in 1948. For three seasons, lorry-loads of rhododendrons arrived with two gardeners to plant them.

Following a light lunch at Plas Newydd’s café, we visit the prehistoric site of Bryn Celli Ddu, meaning ‘the mound in the dark grove’. This is an impressive Neolithic chambered tomb with partially restored entrance passage and mound, on the site of a former henge monument.

In the late afternoon we return to Conwy, where we shall enjoy a farewell dinner together at Bodysgallen Hall. (Overnight Bodysgallen Hall) BLD

 

Day 20: Sunday 16 June, Bodysgallen Hall – Manchester Airport. Tour Ends.

Departure transfer to Manchester Airport
This morning we depart Bodysgallen Hall and travel to Manchester Airport for our return flight to Australia. The ASA ‘designated’ flight is scheduled to depart in the early afternoon. B

 

Physical Endurance & Practical Information

Physical Rating

The number of flags is a guide to the degree of difficulty of ASA tours relative to each other (not to those of other tour companies). It is neither absolute nor literal. One flag is given to the least taxing tours, seven to the most. Flags are allocated, above all, according to the amount of walking and standing each tour involves. Nevertheless, all ASA tours require that participants have a good degree of fitness enabling 2-3 hours walking or 1-1.5 hours standing still on any given site visit or excursion. Many sites are accessed by climbing slopes or steps and have uneven terrain.

 

This 20-day Cultural Garden Tour of England & Wales involves:

A large amount of walking (ranging from one to five kilometres per day) often up and down hills, flights of stairs, cobbled streets, and uneven ground (especially during some of the garden site visits), and/or standing, interspersed with coach travel.
Extensive coach travel, some on winding country roads.
Visiting a range of towns and villages on foot, involving walks uphill from bus parks to historic town centres and other sites.
Many early-morning departures (between 8.00-8.30am), concluding in the late afternoon (5.30-6.30pm).
Travelling to the United Kingdom during summer. June is the sunniest month of the year across England and Wales. While the average day-time temperature is 18-20°C, in recent years England has experienced heatwaves reaching up to 35°C.
This tour includes the use of audio headsets, which amplify the voice of your guide (despite noisy surroundings). This technology also allows you to move freely during site visits without missing any information.

Other considerations:

3- to 5-star hotels with three hotel changes; some hotels do not have in-room air-conditioning.
You must be able to carry your own hand luggage. Hotel porterage includes 1 piece of luggage per person.
A trip on the Snowdon Mountain Railway (Diesel Service: Summit return – Day 15).
It is important to remember that ASA programs are group tours, and slow walkers affect everyone in the group. As the group must move at the speed of the slowest member, the amount of time spent at a site may be reduced if group members cannot maintain a moderate walking pace. ASA tours should not present any problem for active people who can manage day-to-day walking and stair-climbing. However, if you have any doubts about your ability to manage on a program, please ask your ASA travel consultant whether this is a suitable tour for you.

Please note: it is a condition of travel that all participants agree to accept ASA’s directions in relation to their suitability to participate in activities undertaken on the tour, and that ASA retains the sole discretion to direct a tour participant to refrain from a particular activity on part of the tour. For further information please refer to the ASA Reservation Application Form.

National Trust Membership

It is a requirement that all travellers on this program have a current membership to the National Trust for the period of the tour. You will need to send a photocopy of your National Trust membership card to ASA prior to the start of the tour, and to carry your card with you throughout the tour program. Different types of National Trust membership are available (family, singles, etc) and the fees vary from state to state. For assistance in joining the National Trust and completing these formalities, please contact ASA.

Practical Information

Prior to departure, tour members will receive practical notes which include information on visa requirements, health, photography, weather, clothing and what to pack, custom regulations, bank hours, currency regulations, electrical appliances and food. The Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade website has advice for travellers: www.smartraveller.gov.au

Gardens of New Zealand with Helen Young

Gardens of New Zealand with Helen Young

 

Join garden writer Helen Young to explore the best of New Zealand’s springtime gardens, including the spectacular annual Taranaki Garden Festival.

New Zealand is a hidden gem of garden design, combining English landscape garden design with colonial heritage, indigenous flora and Māori reverence for the natural world.

Begin in Christchurch on the South Island and wander through Broadfield Garden and the elegant Ohinetahi. Visit Upton Oaks, Paripuma and Bankhouse near Blenheim and then cross the Cook Strait to the North Island to visit the annual Taranaki Garden Festival in New Plymouth, where scores of private gardens open their gates to visitors for just a few days in the year. Conclude in Auckland, with a visit to Ayrlies Garden, the ‘quintessential New Zealand garden’.

 

AT A GLANCE:

• In the Christchurch region, wander through the carefully structured Ohinetahi Garden and then visit Broadfield, which combines rhododendrons, lilies and daffodils with a forest of indigenous ferns and Kauri trees
• In New Plymouth, explore private gardens open only during the Taranaki Garden Festival, an annual showcase of more than 40 gardens, celebrity chef demonstrations and guided walks
• Visit the knot-garden of Upton Oaks in Blenheim, and the gardens of Barewood in Awatere, designed to complement a century-old homestead, and Ayrlies Garden in Auckland
• Enjoy the wine of New Zealand’s famed Marlborough region, one of the great Sauvignon Blanc producers of the world.

 

TOUR LEADER:

Horticulturist, garden writer, presenter and author, Helen Young has led more than 20 garden tours internationally and domestically. She is well known for her weekly columns in The Weekend Australian over the last 17 years, and as House and Garden magazine’s garden writer for more than 10 years. Sydneysiders know her as a long-term regular expert on ABC Sydney Radio’s Saturday morning gardening program, but she also runs her own successful horticulture business.

 

Friday 19 October 2018 / Arrive Christchurch

Suggested afternoon arrival in Christchurch. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements. In the evening join Helen and fellow garden lovers for a special welcome dinner. (D)

 

Sat 20 Nov / Christchurch

Today explore two outstanding gardens. First visit Broadfield New Zealand Landscape Garden, a 3.5 hectare showcase garden established in the 1990s. Many native plants are used formally and informally as are NZ-raised varieties of azaleas, rhododendrons, camellias, maples, peonies and roses. It includes a Kauri forest with over 100 trees and scores of species of other forest trees, shrubs, climbers and ferns.
After lunch, visit Ohinetahi, a well-structured, carefully designed garden created by architect Sir Miles Warren which consists of a number of formal rooms, of differing style and character. The garden houses an important sculpture collection and a small art gallery. Hedges are used to shelter plants that would otherwise struggle in the high winds. Features include a herb potager, box-edged rose garden, herbaceous borders, a ‘Red Garden’, gazebo, rectangular pond, arched bridge and statues. There are spectacular views down to Lyttleton Harbour. Enjoy afternoon tea in the garden before returning to your hotel for an evening at leisure.(BL)

 

Sun 21 Oct / Christchurch – Greymouth

Enjoy a morning to explore the Christchurch Botanic Gardens. Founded in 1863 with the planting of an English oak tree, over the years natural wetlands and sand dunes have been transformed into an elegantly cultivated 21 hectare park with more than 10 different gardens framed by mature trees and expansive lawns, which are mostly contained within a loop of the Avon River.

After lunch in the gardens, depart Christchurch for a scenic drive over the Southern Alps to Greymouth. Drive across the Canterbury Plain and climb to more than 900 metres through Arthur’s Pass National Park before descending to Greymouth. In the late afternoon, arrive in Greymouth, known for its gold mining heritage and pounamu (New Zealand jade). (BLD)

 

Mon 22 Oct / Greymouth – Blenheim

Depart Greymouth and travel along the scenic West Coast, stopping to see the New Zealand fur seal colony at Cape Foulwind and the Punakaiki pancake rocks and blowholes.

Begin your exploration of the Marlborough area and its gardens with Bankhouse Garden, one of the highlights of the Wairau Valley. Meander through the lower level into a shaded gully that hosts rhododendrons and bog plants. Continue towards the house and onwards to the upper level garden terraces where you find rambling roses and a variety of drought-resistant plants. In the afternoon, arrive in Blenheim, our base for the next three nights. (BD)

 

Tue 23 Oct / Blenheim

After breakfast, visit Barewood Garden for a guided tour and lunch. Recognised as a ‘Garden of National Significance’, Barewood garden is designed to complement the 100-year-old homestead, and features formal allées of hawthorn and Malus, plantings of unusual trees and shrubs and a classic potager featuring espaliered fruit.

Continue to Paripuma Garden, with its unique collection of indigenous and rare plant species that have created a haven for wildlife on what was once a bare sandy paddock.

Depart for a visit to Allan Scott Wines, the family-owned winery established by Allan and Catherine Scott. Enjoy a wine tasting and free time in the European-style courtyard with its exceptional gardens and vistas over the vineyards beyond. (BL)

 

Wed 24 Oct / Blenheim

Begin with a visit to Huguette Michel’s Hortensia House. The Monet-inspired garden is informal in design and is loosely themed on blue and yellow, capturing an essence of serenity and reflecting the colours of the house. Huguette’s favourite shade of hydrangea is blue and these, along with lavenders, forget-me-nots, love-in-a-mists and other plants provide the blue tones throughout the garden. Yellow is provided by varieties of roses, pansies, daisies, aquilegias and gazanias.

Following a wine tasting and lunch at a local winery, visit Upton Oaks, the English-inspired garden of Dave and Sue Monahan developed around a restored 1911 Victorian villa. Brick walls, ponds, perennial borders and a 17th century style ‘knot-garden’ are divided into sections by colour. Upton Oaks is also recognised as a ‘Garden of National Significance’.
(BL)

 

Thu 25 Oct / Blenheim – Wellington

After breakfast, depart for Picton and enjoy the scenic crossing on the Interislander ferry to Wellington. The three-hour journey is considered one of the most spectacular cruises in the world. Arrive at the hotel in the early afternoon and enjoy some free time in Wellington. (BL)

 

Fri 26 Oct / Wellington

Begin with a walking orientation tour of the vibrant city of Wellington, nestled around the harbour and surrounded by natural scenery. See the famous ‘Beehive’ and Parliament Buildings and visit Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Drive out of Wellington into the picturesque Ohariu Valley to Pepped Warbeck garden, another ‘Garden of Significance’. The garden consists of a majestic entrance and long curving drive, planted with Marlborough daisies and many different native trees and shrubs. Extensive lawns sweep down to the re-modelled bog garden which features five adjoining ponds planted with primulas, bog irises, hostas and gunnera.

After lunch, return to Wellington for a visit to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, a fascinating centre dedicated to art, history and Māori culture. Its Māori name translates as ‘The Treasure Chest’. (BL)

 

Sat 27 Oct / Wellington – New Plymouth

Depart Wellington for a leisurely drive to New Plymouth. En route, stop for lunch and a visit to Nicki and Clive Higgie’s garden, Paloma, near Wanganui. This exotic ‘Garden of National Significance’ is landscaped with plants from all over the world, and is presented as several distinct zones, including the Palm Garden, the Desert House, the Garden of Death, the Bamboo Forests, the Jardin Exotique, the Wedding Lawn and the two Arboreta. In the afternoon, continue to New Plymouth, our base for the next four nights. (BL)

 

Sun 28 – Tue 30 Oct / New Plymouth (Taranaki Garden Festivals)

New Plymouth is home to the annual ten-day PowerCo Taranaki Garden Festival (formerly the Taranaki Rhododendron & Garden Festival), which showcases some of New Zealand’s most stunning private and public gardens.

The 2018 festival features over 40 diverse and inspiring gardens, including many ‘Gardens of National Significance’, newly-added gardens and more than a dozen special events. Nearly all of the gardens are private gardens and are opened exclusively for the duration of the festival.

The festival includes a mixture of events, including house and garden tours, celebrity chef demonstrations, guided walks, workshops and a diverse garden speaker series.

During this period, another garden festival also takes place in Taranaki region – the Taranaki Fringe Garden Festival. The Fringe Festival includes a selection of gardens from cottage gardens to native gardens, highly structured to informal gardens, and is presented with a distinctive laid-back Kiwi charm.

Helen and the festival organisers will curate a stimulating programme in both the PowerCo Taranaki Garden Festival and the Taranaki Fringe Garden Festival, from the huge range of gardens and events on offer over the three days we will spend here.

In addition to its beautiful parks and gardens, the city of New Plymouth is known for its sunny climate and art galleries, while the conical shape of Mount Taranaki provides a dramatic backdrop to the city. Meanwhile, down at the waterfront are Puke Ariki, an integrated museum-library-heritage centre, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand’s first museum of contemporary art, and the Len Lye Centre, the country’s first museum devoted to a single artist. (B, L or D)

 

Wed 31 Oct / New Plymouth – Hamilton – Auckland

Depart New Plymouth for a leisurely day’s drive to Auckland. En route, stop in Hamilton to visit the Hamilton Garden. Often mistakenly referred to as a ‘botanic garden’, Hamilton Garden is rather a collection of themed gardens, exploring different civilisations and recreating historically important garden styles from around the world. In the afternoon, continue to Auckland. (BD)

 

Thu 01 Nov / Auckland

Spend the day in some of Auckland’s most interesting gardens. In the morning, visit Ayrlies, situated in the gently rolling country of east Auckland. This is one of New Zealand’s best-known gardens, characterised by sweeping lawns and informal but detailed plantings beside ponds and waterways. Then visit Eden Garden with its collections of perennials, vireyas, camellias, bromeliads and native New Zealand plants. Return to the hotel for an afternoon at leisure. In the evening, celebrate the conclusion of the tour with a special farewell dinner with Helen and fellow travellers. (BD)

 

Fri 02 Nov / Depart Auckland

Tour arrangements conclude after breakfast. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements, including flights and post-tour accommodation. (B)

 

Note: At time of publication (April 2018), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than two to three months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

Gardens in Spanish Culture

Gardens in Spanish Culture

 

**Filling**

 

ITINERARY

The following itinerary describes a range of gardens, heritage sites, museums and other sites which we plan to include. Some are accessible to the public, but others require special permission which may only be confirmed closer to the tour’s departure. The daily activities described in this itinerary may change or be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate alterations in opening hours and confirmation of private visits. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents prior to departure. The tour includes breakfast daily, lunches & evening meals indicated in the detailed itinerary where: B=breakfast, L=lunch and D=evening meal.

 

Seville – 3 nights

Day 1: Tuesday 14 May, Arrive Seville

Arrival transfer for participants arriving on the ASA ‘designated’ flight. On arrival at Seville’s airport, participants taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer by private coach to our hotel, ideally located just 250 metres from Seville Cathedral. If you are travelling independently please meet the group at the Hotel Inglaterra.

Seville gained great importance and prosperity in the 12th century when the Almohad dynasty of North African Berbers made it the capital of Muslim Spain (al Andalus); and again in the 16th century, when it became the Spanish entrepôt for silver and tobacco from the Americas. Its major monuments and most important works of art date from these periods and from the 13th and 14th centuries, when Ferdinand III of Castile wrested the province from the Muslims in 1248. Seville therefore boasts fine Muslim, Gothic, Mudéjar and Baroque monuments (‘Mudéjar’ is the term which denotes buildings built for Christians by Muslim craftsmen). In the 17th century it vied with Madrid as the centre of Spanish sculpture and painting. Zurbarán, Velázquez and Murillo all worked in Seville and the city produced a fine school of polychrome wood sculpture, examples of which are still used in processions for Holy Week (Semana Santa). In the 19th century, Seville became a picturesque setting for Northern European Romantic novels, artworks and operas, because of the popularity of Murillo’s paintings of street urchins, Seville’s famous bullfights, and the magnificence of its celebrations during Holy Week. (Overnight Seville)

 

Day 2: Wednesday 15 May, Seville

Welcome Meeting
Museum of Fine Arts (Museo de Bellas Artes)
Royal Alcázar of Seville
Welcome Dinner at a private 17-century palace

This morning, following a Welcome Meeting at the hotel, we begin with a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville, a large museum of Andalucian art which was refurbished for Expo ’92. The museum is located in the former convent of the Merced Calzada whose architecture exemplifies Andalucian 17th-century mannerism, designed around three patios and a large stairway. It opened its doors to the public in 1841 with the works from closed down convents and monasteries. Today it is one of the best fine arts museums in Spain, whose impressive collection extends from the medieval to the modern, focusing on the work of Seville School artists such as Francisco de Zurbarán, Juan de Valdés Leal and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

Following some time at leisure for lunch, we visit Seville’s Alcázar, a fine Muslim palace built, not by the Islamic city’s Almohad dynasty, but by the Christian king, Pedro the Cruel, in the 14th century. This palace, its courtyards lined with fine stucco reliefs and coloured tiles, speaks of the cultural ambivalence of the Christian invaders who emulated the tastes of the vanquished Islamic princes. The Alcázar echoes the Alhambra (Granada) in its richness, and was, in fact, built in conscious imitation of that great group of mansions. The complex grew beyond Pedro’s original palace and eventually included, for example, the Oratory of the Catholic Monarchs, with splendid early 16th-century polychrome tiles, a fine garden with a subterranean bath, and rooms in which expeditions to South America were planned. Appended to the palace is one of Spain’s greatest and most interesting gardens. These began as a typical Almohad ‘paradise’ garden, and although little remains of the original because of successive plantings by Christian monarchs (especially in the 19th and 20th centuries), much of the Mudéjar architecture (pavilions), the lovely discrete walled gardens near the palace, the ubiquitous pools and gently bubbling fountains, all reflect Spain’s cultural debt to the Muslims. Magnolia grandiflora, pittorosporum, palms, peaches, roses and bitter oranges share this garden with fascinating Central- and South American species brought back to Spain when Seville prospered as the country’s gateway to its colonies.

This evening we enjoy an exclusive Welcome Dinner at an elegantly restored private 17th-century Casa Palacio (stately home) in the heart of Seville, a short walk from our hotel. (Overnight Seville) BD

 

Day 3: Thursday 16 May, Seville

Santa Cruz Quarter and the Hospital de los Venerables (Fundación Focus)
Cathedral and Giralda of Seville
Casa de Pilatos

Today we walk through the Santa Cruz quarter, Seville’s medieval ghetto. Despite its narrow winding streets, this precinct grew in popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries. Aristocrats built small palaces here, without disturbing its original, picturesque street plan.

We also visit the 17th-century Hospital de los Venerables. Originally one of Seville’s many charitable institutions, this is now a cultural centre. Of particular interest is its sunken courtyard, which is a fascinating fusion of a convent-cloister and a patio, a central court so characteristic of Spanish secular architecture. Arcaded galleries supporting the upper levels of the house surround this courtyard. Its design is a pleasant interplay of spaces of square and curved plan.

Our walk ends at Seville’s Cathedral. This huge building, which is the largest Gothic structure of its type in Europe, was built upon the foundations of the Almohad Friday Mosque by the Christian conquerors of the city. It retains the general plan and dimensions of the mosque and its courtyard that was used by the Islamic population for ritual ablutions. The courtyard, as its name – Patio de los Naranjos – suggests, is now dominated by a veritable forest of orange trees. Although now used primarily as a thoroughfare, the courtyard would once have provided Islamic students with a quiet shady place for the study of the Qur’an; plantings would have been more diverse at that time. The cathedral boasts what is arguably Spain’s greatest retablo mayor, a massive gilt and painted wood retable occupying the whole of the chancel wall. It also contains a number of major medieval, Renaissance and Baroque artworks and the tomb of Christopher Columbus.

The cathedral’s bell tower, originally the minaret of the Almohad Friday mosque, is in the same style as those at Rabat and Marrakesh in Morocco. It is a monumental, square tower that houses seven superimposed rooms. Access is provided by a ramp up which the Imam once rode a donkey five times a day to call the faithful to prayer. The exquisite brick patterns on its four façades assured its survival when Seville fell to the Christians. Upon it they placed a belfry (bells are anathema to Islam) and a weather vane, or Giraldillo, which gives the tower its modern name, ‘Giralda’.

Unlike their Parisian counterparts in that city’s aristocratic district, the Marais, Seville’s noble palaces are usually found, not in exclusive suburbs, but in the narrow streets of the city that in the past would have been inhabited by vendors, craftsmen, beggars, and Murillo’s street urchins. Their often bland façades, however, give on to lovely patios and gardens which, following Islamic tradition, are enclosed, secret paradises embedded in, but contrasting dramatically to, the noisy, dirty, smelly city outside the walls. This afternoon we visit a Sevillian mansion of the late-15th and 16th centuries, the Casa de Pilatos. Built by Fabrique de Ribera in 1519, it owes its name to a legend that it was modelled upon Pilate’s house in Jerusalem. Processions during Holy Week used to leave this building, winding their way out of the city to the Cruz del Campo, the distance believed to be exactly that from Pilate’s Jerusalem Praetorium to Golgotha, where Christ was crucified. The house, organised around a great patio, is a fascinating mix of Mudéjar, Flamboyant Gothic and Renaissance elements. An antique sculpture collection, adorning the main patio and the Jardín Chico (small garden), reflects the humanist tastes of its original owners. This garden also has a delightful pool, which was the water tank of the original house. This, and the Jardín Grande, have a marvellous variety of plants, including clusters of citrus and banana trees that thrive in Seville’s warm climate, and myriad flowers. The walls that enclose the gardens and their loggias are covered with brilliantly coloured bougainvillea and wisteria. Paths with yellow sand, also used in the bullrings of southern Spain, add yet more colour. Mature palms and figs give the gardens ample shade. (Overnight Seville) B

 

Córdoba – 2 nights

Day 4: Friday 17 May, Seville – Hornachuelos – Palma del Río – Córdoba

Gardens of the Palace of Moratalla, Hornachuelos
Lunch at the Monasterio de San Francisco, Palma del Río
Evening walking tour of the Patios of the Zona Alcazar Viejo, San Basilio District of Córdoba

Today we drive from Seville to Córdoba, capital of the great Caliphate of Córdoba, the earliest Muslim State in Spain (712-1031). Our first visit is to the gardens of the Moratalla Palace (‘the Moor’s Lookout’), near the Sierra Morena, the mountain range that separates the Guadalquivir Valley and Andalucia from the vast plain of La Mancha in New Castile. This was originally a 19th-century English landscape garden but has been transformed over the last 150 years, not least by the great French garden designer Jean-Claude Nicholas Forestier, who fused a French grand vista with Neo-Arab elements, such as patios with brickwork, tiles and low fountains. Cypresses (Cupressus sempervirens and Cupressus arizonica), oleanders and mimosas contribute to the (French) perspective that these Arab elements inflect. This garden, like the Casa de Pilatos, was a property of the famous Medinacelli family and the present proprietor, the Duke of Segorbe, takes a very dynamic approach, constantly transforming it. He believes the garden to be a living world and therefore a place where constant transformations may be made. He was a friend of Salvador Dalí, with whom he shared an interest in philosophy. The fruits of this friendship are seen in garden details like the spiral pool; the spiral is an age-old image of unity and infinity.

Nearby, we enjoy lunch at the Restaurante Monasterio de San Francisco, a religious foundation founded by the seventh Lord of Palma in the late 15th century.

Our visit to Córdoba has been planned to coincide with the Córdoba Patio Festival. This city has some of the loveliest small urban gardens in Spain, located in the courtyards of old Córdoban houses. Some of these houses are very, very old; everywhere in the ancient city fragments of Muslim dwellings built before the end of the 11th century can be found. Even if houses were constructed later, they follow earlier plans because their foundations (and many of their cellars) are the walls of older houses. Once a year, Córdoba opens its patios in an Andalucian version of our open garden scheme; prizes are given to the best exhibits. Many of the previous prize-winners are in the San Basilio district of the city near our hotel. (Overnight Córdoba) BL

 

Day 5: Saturday 18 May, Córdoba

Synagogue, Córdoba
Great Mosque, Córdoba
Time at leisure
Late afternoon walking tour of Córdoba Patios including the patios of the Palacio de Viana

After breakfast at our hotel located in the Jewish Quarter (Judería) of the city, we visit Córdoba’s delightful small synagogue. The Jews arrived in Córdoba before the Muslims and almost immediately made it a centre of learning. They established the Jewish Quarter after the city had become the capital of Muslim Spain. Its 14th-century synagogue is one of three surviving medieval synagogues in Spain. It has a women’s gallery, and the upper reaches of its walls are in the Mudéjar stucco style, with Hebrew inscriptions. These stuccoes, like those of many mosques, alternate geometrical and vegetal motifs.

We continue with a visit to the Great Mosque of Córdoba. The mosque (c.786-986), one of the earliest and finest still standing, was constructed by successive members of the Ummayad dynasty. Its outer façades boast exquisite geometrical and floral patterns set in the tympana of horseshoe arches and in panels above them. Within the prayer hall is a forest of columns supporting superimposed tiers of polychrome arches thought to have been modelled upon the Roman aqueduct at Mérida. The mihrab (prayer niche) is adorned with exquisite abstract designs in mosaic executed by a school of Byzantine mosaicists from Constantinople. These mosaics, and those of the domes above the mihrab, give meaning to Allah’s prescription to the prophet concerning images: that they should act as a simile to nature, not an abstraction of it; and that they should convey by their delicacy the notion that nothing material has meaning or permanence. The mosque is punctured by a huge cathedral; its minaret became the cathedral bell tower.

Following some time at leisure, we continue to explore the patios of Córdoba including a visit to the Palacio de Viana. Located on the northern edge of the old town, this traditional Andalusian mansion features twelve patios covering the Renaissance and Baroque periods with fountains, formal parterres, citrus trees, date palms and roses with a profusion of pots, pebbled floors and elegant arches. (Overnight Córdoba) B

 

Ronda – 1 night

Day 6: Sunday 19 May, Córdoba – Ronda

Puente Nuevo, Ronda
Bullring, Ronda
Casa del Rey Moro, Ronda

Private palace garden, Ronda (by special appointment)
This morning we depart early for the magnificent Andalusian ‘white town’ of Ronda, dramatically sited on sheer cliffs above a deep ravine, with grand panoramic views framed by mountains. The early 19th-century artists David Roberts and J.F. Lewis both painted the picturesque view of the Puente Nuevo (New Bridge) which spans the deep ravine, ‘El Tajo‘, separating the two parts of Ronda, the old Muslim town and the Christian district, the Mercadillo. The Guadelvin River cut this ravine, and the high bridge which spans it was built in the late 18th century. Of Roman origin, Ronda became an almost impregnable Muslim fortress city until the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella took it in 1485.

In 1493, eight years after the Christian capture of the city, the Maestranza, a Company of Knights was formed here for the supervision of bullfighting. Ronda’s bullring, the second oldest in Spain after that of Seville, was built here in 1794. In the 18th century Ronda’s greatest matador was Pedro Romero, who is believed to have developed the classical bull-fighting style of the School of Ronda. We shall visit the bullring in the Mercedillo.

The old town preserves its Muslim street plan. Here we visit the Casa del Rey Moro, the Moorish King’s House. The present 18th-century palace purportedly occupies the site of a palace of one of the petty Muslim kings of Ronda, and has a fine garden with steps leading down to the river below. The splendid small Hispano-Moresque garden (hortus conclusus) was originally designed by the great 19th-century gardener Jean-Claude Nicholas Forestier for the house’s owner, the Duchess of Parcent. Forestier (1861-1930), a botanical and forestry expert, town planner and garden designer, was extremely influential in Spain, Cuba and Central America. He became conservateur of the promenades of Paris and developed an arboretum at Vincennes and the gardens of the Champ-de-Mars below the Eiffel Tower. He also influenced the layout of Havana and Buenos Aires. He is renowned for his innovations, including the ‘Neo-Arab’ or ‘Neo-Sevillian’ garden. His own gardens and those inspired by his innovations are to be found throughout Spain, amongst them are the Park of María Luisa in Seville and Montjuïc in Barcelona. His gardens in Ronda combine Islamic features like ceramic tiles with the formality of a European garden. A wide variety of carefully combined trees such as palms, laurel, cedar, oleander and myrtle form a verdant canopy under which a profusion of flowers gives colour and fragrance.

This evening we enjoy special access to one of Ronda’s finest stately residences. The Palacio is an 18th-century renovation of an earlier 16th-century building, gifted to the current owner’s family by the Reyes Catolicos. Its impressive Baroque entrance displays sculpted figures believed to represent natives of South America. Its delightful hidden garden includes a rare 200-year-old pinsapo (evergreen fir). Abies pinsapo is a species of fir native to southern Spain and northern Morocco. Related to other species of Mediterranean firs, it is considered the Andalusian National Tree. In Spain, it appears at altitudes of 900–1,800 metres in the Sierra de Grazalema in the province of Cádiz and the Sierra de las Nieves and Sierra Bermeja, both near Ronda in the province of Málaga.

Tonight we dine together in the restaurant of the Parador de Ronda, which serves Andalusian specialties and fresh local produce. (Overnight Ronda) BD

 

Málaga – 1 night

Day 7: Monday 20 May, Ronda – Málaga

Visit and lunch at a private country house hosted by the owners, province of Málaga
Centre Pompidou Málaga

This morning we drive through the hills above the Mediterranean coast to Málaga. En-route we visit an outstanding example of a Mediterranean classical garden created with cypresses and geometric hedges in terraces. The owners, who are keen gardeners, will give us a tour of their creation and host a delicious lunch of Andalucian and Catalan specialties.

We arrive in Málaga in the early afternoon and check in to our hotel, conveniently located opposite the cathedral and a few minutes’ walk from Málaga’s waterfront.

Málaga, (malaka: fish salting place), was founded by the Phoenicians around 800 BC. The city grew to become a major port in Roman times, exporting olive oil and garum (fish paste), as well as copper, lead and iron from the mines in the mountains around Ronda. Málaga continued to flourish under Moorish rule from the 8th century AD and became a prosperous port of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada. The city held out against the invading Christian armies until 1487 and displayed equal tenacity against Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

In the afternoon we visit a branch of Paris’ famous Pompidou Centre, which opened on Málaga’s waterfront in 2015. Housed in an extraordinary post-modernist coloured glass cube, the Centre, like its Parisian parent, has a collection of 20th century art, including works by Robert Delauney, Vassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, René Magritte and Frida Kahlo, and also holds interesting temporary exhibitions. (Overnight Málaga) BL

 

Granada – 3 nights

Day 8: Tuesday 21 May, Ronda – Málaga – Granada

Walking tour of Málaga including the Museo Picasso
Visit and lunch at a private Andalucian farmhouse hosted by the owners, Málaga
Historical-Botanical Garden La Concepción, Málaga

We spend the morning visiting key sites in Málaga. Our walking tour will take in the Renaissance Cathedral with its fine Baroque façade, the remains of the Roman theatre and the exterior of Málaga’s Alcázar (citadel).

We also visit the Picasso Museum, housed in a fine 16th-century palace built on 2500-year-old Phoenician remains. Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881 and in 2003 a Picasso Museum was established here in response to the artist’s desire for his work to be exhibited in his city of birth; it features 233 paintings, sculptures and ceramics created between 1892 to 1972. This rich collection was donated by Christine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the artist’s daughter-in-law and grandson. The opening of the Picasso Museum initiated a revival in the cultural life of the city.

We then drive south of the city to a traditional Andalucian cortijo (country estate), owned by one of Spain’s most well known literary families. The estate features a lush subtropical garden with an outstanding Phytolacca dioica tree and an alley of Pecan trees. Following a tour of the garden, we enjoy a sumptuous lunch of local specialities hosted by the owners and learn about the estate’s literary history.

Nearby we visit Málaga’s La Concepción garden, begun in 1889 by Thomas Livermore, who was the British consul in this city. La Concepción, which at one point commands views down over the city, is an important example of a Mediterranean coastal garden.

We continue our drive through the Sierra Nevada, which acted as a barrier, protecting Spain’s last Muslim kingdom, Granada, from Christian incursions. We shall gain a deeper understanding about the way the mountains isolated Granada from the grand views we will encounter along this road. (Overnight Granada) BL

 

Day 9: Wednesday 22 May, Granada

Alhambra and Generalife
Carmen of the Fundacion Rodriguez Acosta
Dinner at the Mirador de Morayma Restaurant

Today we visit the Alhambra (1354-1391) and Generalife (summer palace and villa of the Nasrid rulers) to study the architecture and garden design of Nasrid Granada. We visit palaces and villas in the complex that centre upon the Court of the Myrtles, the Court of the Lions, and the Generalife. The first complex – comprising of the Patio de Machuca, the Mexuar, the Patio del Cuarto Dorado, and the Patio de Comares (Court of the Myrtles) – gives a sense of the disposition of an Islamic palace, the discrete, hermetic spaces of which bespeak Islam’s emphasis on privacy. This complex combines areas where the ruler sat in court or received ambassadors with a harem designed to isolate the royal household from the outside world. In essence the palace is introverted, its main façade secreted within the Patio del Cuarto Dorado, rather than turning outwards to announce to the outside world the palaces within, in the way of a Western façade. The Hall of the Ambassadors is an example of the spatial rhetoric of power, while the Patio de Comares used a great pool and trees (later replaced by hedges of myrtle) to create a paradisal, secluded core to the complex. Next to this group is the villa of the Nasrids, built about the Court of the Lions, whose fine stucco arches and slender columns are, some scholars argue, the architectural evocation of an oasis. Here we find rooms decorated with exquisite detailing, such as the Abencerrajes Gallery, the Sala de los Reyes, and the Sala de las Dos Hermanas, two of which have extraordinary stucco domes reproducing star bursts in the desert sky. Beneath this villa there is yet another villa, to which are attached the Royal Baths.

We then walk out across the pine-forested hills of the Alhambra Mountain to the Generalife, an exquisite villa retreat and hunting lodge of the Nasrids. Here we see gardens to rival the Villa d’Este outside Rome, with fine fountains whose sounds were intended to provide a poetic counterpoint to the architectural aesthetics of the Arab palace or villa.

Finally, we shall visit the Alcazaba, the fortress of the Alhambra, which has a broad panorama of the Sierra Nevada. The Alhambra and Generalife complexes sit within what could almost be termed a ‘forest’ that covers their hills. Watered by conduits from the Sierra Nevada, this lush environment enabled not only the inimitable orchestration of buildings and plants in the main complex, but also a proliferation of fine small villas with gardens called carmenes. A carmen is a typical house of the old quarter of Granada that has a walled garden, the counterpart of, but different to the patios of Córdoba. The word comes from the Arabic word for garden: karm. These villas became fashionable in the 16th century when wealthy Christians purchased a number of old, Islamic, town houses and demolished parts of them to make a walled garden. They often employed Moorish craftsmen to design and decorate them. The carmenes of Granada were, of course, both inspired by, and measured, the great Islamic palace and villa complex of the Alhambra.

Just a short walk away is the Carmen of the Fundación Rodríguez-Acosta, arguably the best Spanish example of interplay between early modern architecture and gardening. Built by the painter José María Rodríguez-Acosta, a native of Granada and friend of the musician de Falla, this fine modernist house develops the local carmen tradition to create a unique interplay of simple brilliant white architecture and the various greens of the garden. The garden, inspired by the Generalife, is made up of a number of terraces oriented towards the plain and the Sierra Nevada in which the fragments of walls and columns in the purest modernist style interplay with cypress hedges whose shapes are ‘architectural’ in their composition, massing and the precise lines of their profiles. The Foundation, which occupies the original house, has works collected by Acosta supplemented by an important collection of Manuel Gómez Moreno composed of works from most periods of Spanish art history.

Tonight we shall dine together at the restaurant Mirador de Morayma, in Granada´s ancient Moorish quarter, the Albaicín, with breathtaking views of the Alhambra. This elegant restaurant housed in a traditional carmen, features traditional local cuisine and ecological wine produced at the restaurant’s own country estate in the Alpujarra region. (Overnight Granada) BD

 

Day 10: Thursday 23 May, Granada

Albaicín quarter
Muslim Baths
Capilla Real
Cathedral
Corral del Carbón
Afternoon at leisure

We begin this morning by exploring Granada’s most important residential quarter, the Albaicín which nestles below the Alhambra. The Albaicín was the last refuge of the Muslims of Granada and traces of its Islamic heritage remain to be discovered, including a beautiful and tranquil bathhouse, and fragments of minarets converted into church towers.

We shall also visit Muslim and Christian sites in the centre of Granada. The Capilla Real (Royal Chapel), built in flamboyant late Gothic style, houses the magnificent Renaissance tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella, their daughter Joan ‘the Mad’ and her husband Philip ‘the Handsome’. In the adjacent Sacristy is a dazzling collection of royal regalia and Flemish paintings. We then walk to the cathedral, one of Spain’s last, which was envisaged by its founder, Charles V, as a model of the heavenly Jerusalem.

We end our tour at the market centre of Islamic Granada where we shall visit the Corral del Carbón, a 14th-century warehouse and inn for merchants, which is the only one of its type to have survived in Spain. Despite recent restoration, the ground plan, the central water trough for animals, and the delicately carved brick and plaster gateway date to the Middle Ages. From here we shall make our way through the Alcaicería, an area of narrow gridded streets which were once part of the covered market (Arabic: al-Qaysariyya) of the Muslim rulers of Granada.  The afternoon will be at leisure. (Overnight Granada) B

 

Toledo – 2 nights

Day 11: Friday 24 May, Granada – Toledo

Toledo Cathedral

Evening reception at private palace garden by landscaping and garden design studio Urquijo-Kastner, Toledo
Today we drive north, through the Sierra Morena, into the vast, arid plain of La Mancha, famed for its association with Don Quixote, and for its dry wine and Manchego cheese. Toledo, located on a promontory created by a bend in the River Tagus or Tajo, is another Spanish city with a multi-layered past. Inhabited at least from Roman times onwards, Toledo (Toletum) was a provincial town until the Visigothic period when it became an important ecclesiastical centre, and in the mid-6th century AD, the Visigothic capital. Visigothic Toledo was dominated by its castle, and although it is long gone, the Alcázar, its successor, stands on its original site.

Toledo was conquered by Arabo-Berber armies in 712 AD and became part of the Umayyad state of Córdoba. The inhabitants of the city regularly revolted against their Umayyad masters and in the early 11th century when the Umayyad Caliphate collapsed, Toledo, like many other cities, became the seat of a Ta’ifa (petty) kingdom. During this period, Toledo became the centre of the Mozarabic Church, whose Visigothic rituals and liturgy were deeply influenced by Muslim culture. It also played an important cultural role in transmitting the rich syncretic literary and scientific heritage of al-Andalus to the Christian north of the Iberian peninsula and on to northern Europe. Toledo was captured by Alfonso VI of Castile in 1085 and was thus one of the first major Muslim cities to fall to the Christians.

Culturally, however, Toledo remained ‘Islamic’ for centuries after the imposition of Christian rule. Large Muslim and Jewish subject communities remained, and they were employed by their new Castilian rulers to emulate earlier Muslim art and architecture, creating a distinctively Toledan Mudéjar style. This style is a blend of Roman, Visigothic, Umayyad and later Almohad styles characterised by decorative screenwork realised in brick on the exteriors of churches and bell towers. Toledan Mudéjar can also be found in the former synagogues of the Judería (ghetto), Santa Maria la Blanca and El Tránsito, which contain stuccowork decoration that mimics Almohad and Nasrid styles respectively. The cathedral, built on the site of the great mosque, also bears many traces of Toledo’s multi-cultural character, whilst the narrow twisting streets of the old city and its absence of open squares and public spaces perpetuate Muslim urban-planning.

This afternoon, we begin our tour of this splendid city with a visit to Toledo’s Cathedral, a Gothic cathedral modelled upon Bourges Cathedral in France. Its construction began two centuries after Toledo’s capture by Alfonso VI of Castile in 1085, and until then the Christians worshipped in the re-dedicated great mosque of the city. In the 14th century the great mosque was finally torn down and a Gothic cathedral constructed on its foundations. Later monarchs and state dignitaries embellished the cathedral by the addition of a rich choir, decorated with reliefs recounting the conquest of Granada, and sumptuous chapels. We shall look at both the exterior and interior of the cathedral, noting in particular the opulent retablo mayor, the choir and the lateral chapels.

The Cathedral Museum holds a range of works by El Greco, Titian, Zurbarán, and Ribera, and the Almohad banners captured by the Castilians at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. In the Treasury we shall see an illuminated manuscript given by St Louis of France to Alfonso X and a massive Gothic gold monstrance in the shape of the intricate flèche of a cathedral.

This evening, we meet Spanish landscape designer Miguel Urquijo, who will show us a beautiful palace garden in the heart of Toledo with magnificent views of the Cathedral. Miguel and his partner Renate Kastner restored the garden in 2008, working from a previous structure of patios, terraces, fountains and paved walks that perfectly represent the classic Spanish urban garden. Cypresses, Canary Palm, pomegranates and olive trees, together with trimmed box hedges, mix in a harmonious chaos punctuated by prickly pears, delicate calas and the essential and colourful geranium. The palace itself encapsulates the overlap of cultures, where Muslim elements coexist with the Jewish and the Christian, and holds an exquisite collection of art and antiques; in this magical setting, we shall enjoy an aperitif hosted by the owners. (Overnight Toledo) B

 

Day 12: Saturday 25 May, Toledo

El Tránsito
Santo Tomé Church
Museo El Greco
Santa Maria la Blanca
Afternoon at leisure

This morning we continue our guided tour of Toledo with visits to the two former Mudéjar synagogues of Santa María la Blanca and El Tránsito. Santa María la Blanca is a 13th-century building which bears a strong similarity to contemporary Almohad architecture further south, whilst El Tránsito is a 14th-century structure with stucco panels of a similar style to those in the Alcázar of Seville and the Alhambra. El Tránsito also houses a small museum that catalogues the Jewish presence in Spain. A highlight of today is the Church of Santo Tomé, home to El Greco’s famous The Burial of Count Orgaz (c.1586). The nearby El Greco museum displays a great collection of the painter’s works, including several of his portraits of apostles and saints, as well as the View and Plan of Toledo.

The afternoon is at leisure for you to explore this splendid city and you may wish to visit the nearby Franciscan monastery of San Juan de los Reyes, originally intended, before the capture of Granada, as the mausoleum of Ferdinand of Aragón and Isabella of Castile. The mausoleum church itself will remind you of the Capilla Real in Granada. (Overnight Toledo) B

 

Jarandilla de la Vera – 2 nights

Day 13: Sunday 26 May, Toledo – Jarandilla de la Vera

Visit and lunch at a private organic farm hosted by the owners, Toledo province

From Toledo in Castile, we head to the western frontier region of Extremadura, famous for its conquistadors like Francisco Pizarro, who conquered much of South America. We travel through an area of undulating hills where traditionally the noble Trujillanos had their olive groves and vines producing oil and wine for their own consumption. Today the region of Extremadura produces approximately 3.3% of the total olive oil produced in Spain. The types of olives that are cultivated in this region for the production of oil include Cornicabra, Carrasqueña and Morisca.

We visit an organic farm that specialises in free-range livestock (sheep and cattle), fresh produce, and specialty products such as extra virgin olive oil, sheep and goat cheeses, and organic wheat products. We shall take a tour of the property and enjoy a lunch of fresh seasonal produce and homemade treats hosted by the owners.

Tonight we stay at the countryside Parador of Jarandilla de la Vera. Housed in a 14th-century castle, this parador retains many historic features including Gothic galleries, a fireplace specially built for Emperor Charles V, and an ancient garden featuring a fountain famous for bringing good fortune. (Overnight Jarandilla de la Vera) BL

 

Day 14: Monday 27 May, Jarandilla de la Vera – Monfragüe

National Park – Jarandilla de la Vera
Monfragüe National Park
Visit and lunch at ‘La Lancha’ – private farm of Eduardo Mencos & Anneli Bojstad, Jarandilla de la Vera

This morning we explore Monfragüe National Park, a UNESCO listed Biosphere Reserve. Accompanied by a local naturalist, we shall study the many species of Mediterranean plants and trees, and visit a number of observation blinds located along the course of the river Tagus in order to view (with the aid of telescopes) the park’s magnificent variety of birds of prey. Monfragüe is an outstanding site for raptors, with more than 15 regular breeding species, including the world’s largest breeding concentration of the Eurasian Black Vulture, a large population of Griffon Vultures, and several pairs of Spanish Imperial Eagle, Golden Eagle and Bonelli’s Eagle. During our tour we shall also view a number of the park’s geological and cultural landmarks including the ‘Bridge of the Cardinal’ the ruined Castle of Monfragüe; and the Penafalcon, an impressive rock face carved by the river Tagus.

Famed Spanish landscape designer, writer and photographer Eduardo Mencos considers the Spanish countryside to be this great ‘maestro’ and source of inspiration. On the grounds of his 30-hectare country farm ‘La Lancha’, Eduardo has produced his version of an 18th-century ‘ornamental farm’ – a landscaped working farm with decorative features such as arbours, antique wells, water reservoirs, ruins. You won’t see a single wire or a water deposit (they are hidden underground). Here Eduardo and Anneli grow organic olives and breed Merino sheep, which roam free around the property. Following a leisurely lunch, we tour the farm and learn about Eduardo’s work and passion for the gardens of his native Spain. (Overnight Jarandilla de la Vera) BL

 

Segovia – 2 nights

Day 15: Tuesday 28 May, Jarandilla de la Vera – Ávila – Segovia

Visit and lunch at private garden by landscaping and garden design studio Urquijo-Kastner, Ávila
Romeral de San Marcos, Segovia

Near the walled city of Ávila, we visit a newly established garden by talented design duo Miguel Urquijo and Renate Kastner. Miguel fell in love with gardening in England while studying biology at the University of Buckingham in the 1980s. Renate has a Master’s Degree from the Technical University Munich/Weihenstephan, Germany’s premier school of Landscape Architecture. Their Ávila garden is particularly interesting for their successful cultivation of the olive tree, a traditional Mediterranean plant, in an area subjected to a harsh continental climate of cold winters and scorching summers. In this rugged landscape, they have planted over 40 olives trees, the owner’s favourite, along with cypresses, giving a distinctly Mediterranean character to the garden. Carefully worked stone walls create terraces and make up the main structure, while Mediterranean shrubs and perennials provide seasonal interest.

In the afternoon we drive to Segovia, where we visit the beautiful Romeral de San Marcos, situated below limestone shelves on the Eresma river at the foot of Segovia’s great castle. The famous landscape architect, Leandro Silva, created this intimate half-acre garden to echo the paradisal feel of an old Segovian huerta (orchard or market garden). Its sheltered position creates a microclimate that protects a wide variety of plants that would not normally prosper in the tough Segovian climate. At times, this small garden bursts into colour provided by a feast of different flowers.

We then check in to our hotel ideally located in the centre of Segovia. (Overnight Segovia) BL

 

Day 16: Wednesday 29 May, Segovia

Alcazar of Segovia
Evening reception at a private palace overlooking Segovia’s Roman aqueduct
Dinner at Mesón de Cándido Restaurant, Segovia

We spend the morning exploring Segovia, a city settled since Roman times. During the early Islamic period, Segovia stood in the marches between the Kingdom of the Asturias and Umayyad Córdoba and may have been temporarily deserted. In the 10th century, the Umayyad caliphs constructed a frontier fortress here. Segovia subsequently became part of the Ta’ifa kingdom of Toledo, and Castilian after the fall of Toledo. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Muslim fortress was rebuilt as a Christian castle and in the 16th century, a Gothic cathedral with unusual Classical domes was constructed. Segovia’s Roman aqueduct, a remarkable dry-stone structure, was partially destroyed in the Middle Ages and rebuilt by Isabella of Castile in the 15th century.

This evening we enjoy exclusive access to a private palace overlooking Segovia’s aqueduct, where we shall be hosted by the owners and enjoy a glass of Sangría in the garden.

We then dine at a Segovia institution, El Mesón de Cándido, to feast on the town’s local speciality, roast suckling pig. (Overnight Segovia) BD

 

Madrid – 3 nights

Day 17: Thursday 30 May, Segovia – Madrid

Prado Museum

This morning we make our way to Madrid and spend the afternoon visiting the Prado Museum. One of the gallery’s key collections comprises the works of Hieronymus Bosch and the Flemish School from the collections of Philip II. The extraordinary apocalyptic visions of Bosch were once housed at the Escorial in the Philip II’s private apartments, but were stored away during the Enlightenment because they were considered too extreme. It was Goya who revived interest in them. We shall also look at the collections of Dürer, Titian and Rubens before moving on to the works of the Spanish Baroque. Our encounter with works by Velázquez and Zurbarán, El Greco and Goya will explore the strange mix of realism and fantastic distortion which distinguishes the Spanish tradition. We shall study the grand portrait tradition, works by Velázquez, such as Las Meninas, and the extraordinary mystical visions of El Greco. We also trace Goya’s development from the early tapestry cartoons through the royal portraits, and horrific visions of the war with the French, to the so-called ‘Black Paintings’ of his old age. (Overnight Madrid) B

 

Day 18: Friday 31 May, Madrid

Patrick Blanc’s Vertical Garden, CaixaForum, Madrid
Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid

Lunch at private landscaped rose garden near Madrid
Private garden by landscape designer Fernando Martos
We make a brief visit to Madrid’s CaixaForum to view an example of Patrick Blanc’s vertical gardens. This is not only the first to be installed in Spain but also the largest implemented to date on a façade without gaps, as it has a planted surface area of 460 m2. The vertical garden forms an impressive natural tapestry made up of 15,000 plants of 250 different species that have transformed one of the buildings adjoining the developed area of the CaixaForum Madrid into a surprising garden.

Nearby are the Royal Botanical Gardens, established by Charles III and designed by Francesco Sabatini and Juan de Villanueva, architect of the Prado. It is understandable that the ruler of a great empire in the Americas should be interested in collecting exotic species. Charles III, in fact, financed plant-collecting expeditions to Mexico, Columbia, Peru and Chile. Despite the fact that the garden lost many valuable trees in a tornado in 1886, most of its important exhibits remain. The garden is shaded by large specimens of tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), cork oaks, camphor trees, eucalyptus, olives, European field elms and mulberries, walnuts, nettle trees and crape myrtle, among many others. In 2005 a modern addition designed by well-known Spanish landscape architect Fernando Caruncho, with architect Pablo Carvajal, was commissioned to house the extensive bonsai collection of former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González. The new garden called the ‘Terraza de los Laureles’ consists of an elevated avenue, a central square with a pond and a small greenhouse, and provides a grand panorama of the historic gardens below.

We then visit a landscaped rose garden created as an oasis in the city by its owner, a ‘rose expert’ and artist specialising in painting botanical motifs on ceramics and porcelain, as well as an exceptional cook. We shall tour the rose beds and enjoy lunch in the gardens.

This afternoon we meet young Spanish landscape designer Fernando Martos. After studying at the School of Landscaping and Gardening in Madrid, Fernando continued his training as a gardener at Newby Hall in Yorkshire, where he fell in love with the seasonal changes and the English style of gardening. Inspired by Beth Chatto and her gardening with drought resistant plants, he began experimenting at his family’s property in the south of Spain. Traditionally, Spanish gardens have followed French or Italian models, but Fernando is quickly being recognised for his talent and innovation by “trying to get the English look using Mediterranean-climate plants.” Fernando will show us one of his latest projects. (Overnight Madrid) BL

 

Day 19: Saturday 1 June, Madrid – Guadalajara – Madrid

Private gardens and farewell lunch hosted by Eduardo Mencos’ family

Today we enjoy visits to the private gardens of one of Spain’s great gardening families. Here we explore how they have changed the arid meseta near the nation’s capital with their distinctive gardens. We drive across the empty plains of Guadalajara province and through the sun-baked olive-covered hills of La Alcarría, to reach the garden created by the Marquesa of Casa Valdés, Eduardo Mencos’ grandmother and author of the seminal book Jardines de España (Gardens of Spain), which has had a profound influence on modern Spanish gardening. Against the advice of many, the Marquesa of Casa Valdés created her garden in 1945 in a particularly arid terrain subject to extreme temperatures. It became a triumph in tempering the environment and a landmark in the development of modern Spanish gardens. We shall enjoy a private tour of the garden, which now belongs to Beatriz Valdés Ozores (Condesa de Bornos), one of the author’s daughters. The Condesa’s sisters, María and Micaela (Eduardo’s mother), will also welcome us to visit their own gardens nearby and kindly host our farewell lunch. (Overnight Madrid) BL

Day 20: Sunday 2 June, tour ends, Madrid

Departure transfer to Madrid’s Airport for participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight
The tour ends in Madrid. Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer to the airport to take their flight home to Australia. Alternatively you may wish to extend your stay in Spain. Please contact ASA if you require further assistance. B

 

Physical Endurance & Practical Information

Physical Rating
The number of flags is a guide to the degree of difficulty of ASA tours relative to each other (not to those of other tour companies). It is neither absolute nor literal. One flag is given to the least taxing tours, six to the most. Flags are allocated, above all, according to the amount of walking and standing each tour involves. Nevertheless all ASA tours require that participants have a good degree of fitness enabling 2-3 hours walking or 1-1.5 hours standing still on any given site visit or excursion. Many sites are accessed by climbing slopes or steps and have uneven terrain.

This 20-day tour involves:

A moderate amount of walking, often up and down hills (e.g. steep inclines in Granada and Ronda) and/or flights of stairs, along cobbled streets and uneven terrain
Standing during museum and other site visits
Moderate coach travel, often on minor roads
Early-morning departures (between 8.00-8.30am), concluding in the late afternoon (between 5.30-6.30pm)
The use of audio headsets which amplify the voice of your guide (despite noisy surroundings). This technology also allows you to move freely during site visits without missing any information.
Other considerations:

4-star hotels with seven hotel changes
You must be able to carry your own hand-luggage. Hotel porterage includes 1 piece of luggage per person
Evening meals are generally not served until 8-8.30pm.
It is important to remember that ASA programs are group tours, and slow walkers affect everyone in the group. As the group must move at the speed of the slowest member, the amount of time spent at a site may be reduced if group members cannot maintain a moderate walking pace. ASA tours should not present any problem for active people who can manage day-to-day walking and stair-climbing. However, if you have any doubts about your ability to manage on a program, please ask your ASA travel consultant whether this is a suitable tour for you.

Please note: it is a condition of travel that all participants agree to accept ASA’s directions in relation to their suitability to participate in activities undertaken on the tour, and that ASA retains the sole discretion to direct a tour participant to refrain from a particular activity on part of the tour. For further information please refer to the ASA Reservation Application Form.

Practical Information
Prior to departure, tour members will receive practical notes which include information on visa requirements, health, photography, weather, clothing and what to pack, custom regulations, bank hours, currency regulations, electrical appliances and food. The Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade website has advice for travellers see: www.smartraveller.gov.au

 

Plant Identification App

During the tour you may wish to consider using a plant identification app. Tim Entwisle suggests “that for a garden tour of Europe that two apps be considered. Download Pl@ntNet for free and use its ‘Western Europe’ dataset, then consider investing $1.03 for the Flowerchecker+ app, which gives you three free identifications from an expert then 1USD for any subsequent identification. Pl@ntNet is probably the most useful for someone just curious about a few plants along the way but it won’t help you with all the garden plants that come from outside Europe (although it does have a couple of other datasets – South America, for example – which might be very useful).” For further information see Tim Entwistle’s review at: www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-11/plant-recognition-apps-no-replacement-for-botanists/8251280

Glorious Gardens of Great Britain with Julie Kinney

Glorious Gardens of Great Britain

CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW, SALISBURY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, OXFORD
with Julie Kinney

 

20 May – 04 June 2019 (16 days)

HIGHLIGHTS…

 

Delight in the springtime bloom at the best of Great Britain’s flower exhibitions, country estates and private gardens in the company of gardening author Julie Kinney.

In London, spend a day at the world-renowned Chelsea Flower Show before travelling to East Sussex to homes and gardens once owned by members of the Bloomsbury group, including the home of Virginia Woolf. Explore the privately-owned Chisenbury Priory in Wiltshire and, near Salisbury, the house and grounds of Highclere Castle, setting of television series Downton Abbey. Discover ornamental country gardens in Wales, before finishing in Oxford with a visit to Waterperry Gardens, former site of the celebrated Waterperry School of Horticulture.

 

AT A GLANCE…

 

• Enjoy a special day of members-only access into the Chelsea Flower Show, before it opens to the public
• Visit more than a dozen private gardens of manors, monasteries and castles
• Explore the estate of Highclere Castle and the market town of Bampton, setting of the television series Downton Abbey
• Spend a day in Bath, amongst the rich heritage of the Roman, Regency and Georgian eras
• Uphold a British culinary tradition at a Pudding Club dinner in Mickleton, Gloucestershire
• Journey through picturesque countryside and quaint villages in England and Wales, replete with Medieval architecture, rolling hills and historical landmarks

Note: At time of publication (April 2018), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than 2 to 3 months prior to visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary. [Appears on first page, underneath Tour Leader biography]

 

SUNDAY 19 MAY 2019 / DEPART AUSTRALIA / NEW ZEALAND

 

Suggested departures on Emirates flights from Australia or New Zealand to London. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements

 

MON 20 MAY / ARRIVE LONDON

Arrive in London and make your own way to the hotel. Tour arrangements begin at 15:00. Join Julie and fellow travellers and enjoy a quintessential English afternoon tea before an evening at leisure. (T)

 

TUE 21 MAY / LONDON

Today, visit the glorious Chelsea Flower Show, with exclusive members’ access ahead of its opening to the public. Held for over 100 years on the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, this prestigious horticultural show exhibits innovative garden designs, rare plants, emerging garden trends and ideas for the home gardener. Wander at your own pace through the award-winning displays and dazzling floral tapestries. The remainder of the afternoon and evening are at leisure. (B)

 

WED 22 MAY / LONDON – ALFRISTON

This morning, depart London for Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. Created in the 1930s by Vita Sackville-West, gardening author and member of the early 20th century Bloomsbury Group, the castle gardens are considered among the most famous in England with its ‘garden rooms’ and use of colour themes in the planting design. Enjoy a talk and explanation of the grounds by Vita’s granddaughter, author Juliet Nicolson, before the gardens’ public opening.

Next, travel to Great Dixter, the former home of garden writer Christopher Lloyd, for a tour by one of the gardeners. A patchwork of perennials, annuals, shrubs and climbers, Great Dixter’s plantings are bold experiments of colour and form. Afterwards, continue to the village of Alfriston. Check in to the hotel, reputed to be one of the country’s oldest inns dating back to the 13th century, with dinner at the hotel. (BD)

 

THU 23 MAY / ALFRISTON

After breakfast, visit Charleston House, home of Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, for a special private garden tour. Later, wander through Monk’s House, the home and garden of Virginia Woolf. With ornamental blooms, narrow garden paths and views over the Downs, the garden was Woolf’s inspiration for her short story The Orchard.

After lunch at a local pub, return to Alfriston, stopping en route at a small church in Berwick where murals painted by the Bloomsbury artists cover the nave walls and chancel arch. The remainder of the day is at leisure, with the opportunity to take a walk on the Sussex Downs or pay a visit to Alfriston Clergy House. (BL)

 

FRI 24 MAY / ALFRISTON – SALISBURY

Depart Alfriston for Colemore House, an exquisite private garden with woodland walk, arched roses and thatched pavilion. Explore the Norman church next door, which dates from the 12th century.

In the afternoon, visit Upton Grey Manor, a private home with a garden designed by British horticulturist Gertrude Jekyll. With a ‘Wild Garden’ and a ‘Formal Garden’, the gardens are considered the most faithfully-restored of Jekyll’s designs. Continue on to Salisbury and arrive at the hotel, which was originally built to house draughtsmen working on Salisbury Cathedral. Dinner is at the hotel. (BD)

 

SAT 25 MAY / SALISBURY

Enjoy a morning at leisure to discover the sights of Salisbury or amble through the famous Salisbury charter markets.

Later in the day, enjoy a tour of the private Chisenbury Priory garden, with its unusual plants, herbaceous borders and orchard. Then, visit Caen Hill Locks, a spectacular engineering feat along the Kennet and Avon Canal. In the late afternoon, travel to Wudston House, where the formal structures of the garden blur into the perennial meadows beyond. Dinner is at a local pub en route back to Salisbury. (BD)

 

SUN 26 MAY / SALISBURY – BATH

Check out of the hotel and depart for the private garden of Iford Manor. The Italianate garden, created by architect Sir Harold Peto in the early 20th century, is characterised by its structural use of cypresses and terraces, cloister garden and statues. Enjoy a tour of the Peto gardens followed by the private Walled garden, normally closed for the family’s exclusive use.

After lunch, visit Hanham Court Gardens. Previously owned by garden designers Isabel and Julian Bannerman, the traditional English gardens feature Romantic elements of rambling roses, bubbling streams, miniature parkland and wildflower meadows. Of particular note is its stumpery, similar in style to the stumpery created for the Prince of Wales at Highgrove by the Bannermans. Arrive in Bath in the late afternoon. (BL)

 

MON 27 MAY / BATH

Enjoy a day at leisure in the town of Bath, a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site with a legacy from the Roman, Regency and Georgian eras. Spend a day exploring its boutique shops and cafés, its plethora of museums or relax in the thermal waters of its Roman baths. (B)

 

TUE 28 MAY / BATH

Today, explore the gardens and estate of Highclere Castle, the filming location of award-winning television series Downton Abbey. Home to the Earls of Carnarvon since the mid-17th century, the sweeping parkland was designed by 18th century landscaper Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, with the grounds containing 250-year-old cedars and several follies, including a Temple of Diana and an Etruscan temple. (B)

 

WED 29 MAY / BATH (MONMOUTHSHIRE)

Today, cross the border into Monmouthshire in Wales. En route, visit the Special Plants Nursery, owned by British garden author Derry Watkins, renowned for its collection of plants from Bulgaria, South Africa and Nepal. Arrive at High Glanau House in Monmouthshire for lunch and a tour of the Arts and Craft-style garden. Designed in the 1920s by Henry Tipping, a former editor of Country Life magazine, the four-hectare garden draws inspiration from the style of Gertrude Jekyll, with spectacular views across the valleys.

Next, travel to the unique and unusual gardens of Veddw House on the Welsh border. With its grass parterre, wave-shaped hedges, and dramatic reflecting pool, the contemporary garden incorporates an interest in the local landscape history and modern ecological gardening practices. (BL)

 

THU 30 MAY / BATH – CHIPPING CAMPDEN

Check out from the hotel and travel north to the town of Barnsley. Stop en route at Tetbury, a historic wool town with medieval cobbled streets and original 16th century merchants’ houses. Arrive in Barnsley for a visit to the garden at The Little House, the first private garden created by renowned British designer Rosemary Verey.

 

Following free time in Bibury, a village once described by William Morris as “the most beautiful village in England”, visit Kingham Hill House, where the geometrical garden designed by Verey features avenues of maple trees, stepped pools and yew hedging. Check in to the hotel in Chipping Campden, and in the evening delight in a Pudding Club dinner, a culinary extravaganza which celebrates the traditional British pudding, officiated by a Pudding Master and featuring a delectable Parade of Puddings. (BD)

 

FRI 31 MAY / CHIPPING CAMPDEN

Begin the day with a tour and talk at Upton Wold, a private garden with undulating landscapes, open vistas and an innovative walnut arboretum. Continue on to the privately-owned Westwell Manor, where an imaginatively-designed garden surrounding the 16th century manor features multiple garden rooms, including the Kitchen Garden, Breakfast Garden and Moon Garden.

Afterwards, enjoy a scenic stop at Bampton Village, the market town used as a setting in Downton Abbey. Dinner tonight is at a local restaurant. BD)

SAT 01 JUN / CHIPPING CAMPDEN – OXFORD

This morning, travel to the private cottage garden of a leading British garden journalist for morning tea, before heading to Hidcote Manor Gardens, considered one of the best gardens of the Arts and Crafts movement and a strong influence on the design of many significant gardens, including Sissinghurst Castle (visited earlier in the tour).

Then, explore another Arts and Craft garden at Kiftsgate Court Gardens, the creation of three generations of female gardeners and famous for its Kiftsgate rose, a scented climbing rose claimed to be the largest rose in Britain. Arrive in Oxford in the late afternoon for check-in and dinner at the hotel. (BD)

 

SUN 02 JUN / OXFORD

Spend a morning at leisure in Oxford, a city with architecture and history reaching back to Saxon times, and a rich selection of botanical and college gardens interwoven through the sandstone buildings of the city.

At midday, strike out for a scenic journey across Oxfordshire. Arrive at Waddesdon Manor, a grand French Renaissance château, built for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the 1870s. Enjoy a tour of the gardens and explore the house at your own pace before partaking in an afternoon tea in the former Servants’ Hall. The evening is at leisure. (BT)

 

MON 03 JUN / OXFORD

In the morning, travel from Oxford to Waterperry Gardens, the previous site of Beatrix Havergal’s Waterperry School of Horticulture for Ladies. A formal knot garden, a waterlily canal and a famous herbaceous border are just a few of the garden’s highlights across its three hectares of ornamental gardens.

Conclude your garden explorations with a visit to a rarely opened private home and garden, which has been described by Britain’s garden writers as the finest garden and restoration in the country. Return to Oxford in the early afternoon for time at leisure.

In the evening, enjoy a cruise on the Thames and a special farewell dinner with Julie and fellow travellers. (BD)

 

TUE 04 JUN / OXFORD – LONDON – DEPART LONDON

Check out from the hotel in the morning and depart Oxford.

For those leaving today, transfer to London Heathrow Airport in time for flights departing from 14:30 (transfer included in tour price).

For those continuing on to London, transfer to central London, arriving at approximately 12:00 (transfer included in tour price). Tour arrangements conclude on arrival at Heathrow Airport or in central London.

Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements, including post-tour accommodation. (B)

 

 

Gardens of Tasmania

Gardens of Tasmania

 

Meander Valley, Bay of Fires and the Derwent and Huon Valleys
with Jennifer Stackhouse

 

28 October – 05 November 2018 (9 days)

Traverse the Island State with garden writer Jennifer Stackhouse to explore springtime gardens from the Meander Valley and Bay of Fires in the north to the Derwent and Huon Valleys in the south.
In the north, explore historic Culzean Gardens, Old Wesley Dale and the apple orchards of Wychwood. Visit Brickendon Estate and Highview country garden near Scottsdale. Explore the spectacular Bay of Fires National Park on a guided walking tour before heading south towards Hobart.

In the Huon and Derwent valleys get to know some of the private gardens and nurseries that make the island bloom, including Eggs and Bacon Cottage Garden and Prospect House Garden.
Complement your exploration of Tasmania by joining our four-day tour to the Tasmanian Chamber Music Festival in the charming town of Evandale beforehand.

 

AT A GLANCE:

 

• Visit Culzean Gardens and Old Wesley Dale in the Meander Valley and Brickendon Estate near Longford, and explore the stunning Bay of Fires National Park
• Discover cottage gardens in the Huon Valley, and visit Crawleigh Wood Nursery, set within lush rainforest
• Gain access to private gardens near Scottsdale and in the Derwent Valley
• Before the tour, take the opportunity to enjoy four days of fine music at the Tasmanian Chamber Music Festival in Evandale

Note: At time of publication (April 2018), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than two to three months prior to the visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary.

 

Sunday 28 October 2018 / Arrive Launceston

Suggested arrival in Launceston in the early afternoon. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements.

Make your way to the hotel and check in. Tour arrangements begin at 17:00 with an orientation tour, encompassing Launceston’s elegant City Park, historic Albert Hall and the thriving Tamar River waterfront.

Continue to Cataract Gorge Reserve for a welcome dinner and drinks with Jennifer and fellow travellers. (D)

 

Mon 29 Oct / Launceston (Meander Valley)

This morning, drive west of Launceston through the Meander Valley to Culzean Gardens in Westbury. Culzean features an Anglo-Indian-style house built in 1841 and a 1.2 hectare lake. During the late spring this colourful garden bursts with rhododendrons and azaleas.

Continue through the Meander Valley to the 1830s estate of Old Wesley Dale near Mole Creek. After lunch, explore this beautifully restored rural property with wonderful views of the Great Western Tiers.

Then visit Wychwood Garden & Nursery, a gorgeous one-hectare temperate garden whose features include sweeping borders full of perennials, old roses and ornamental grasses, a fruit and vegetable garden, a heritage apple orchard, water features and woodland areas.Return to Launceston in the late afternoon before an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

Tue 30 Oct / Launceston

Discover Tasmania’s World Heritage Brickendon Estate. Enjoy a morning tea and a guided tour of its special garden, with the added enjoyment of the beauty of 180-year-old trees from all parts of the world.

Enjoy lunch at the Jolly Farmer Inn, followed by a tour of its Georgian-style building dating back to 1826 and charming garden.

Continue to Evandale, a National Trust-classified Georgian village. Visit Leybourne private garden, and then enjoy some free time in the village before returning to Launceston. (BL)

 

Wed 31 Oct / Launceston – St Helens

Depart Launceston for a full day’s drive across the Northeast to St Helens. On the way, visit Anabel’s Garden in Scottsdale and Highview country garden. Enjoy a warm country welcome from the owners and lunch in a garden.

Arrive in St Helens in the late afternoon and check in to the hotel. Enjoy dinner in the hotel restaurant. (BLD)

 

Thu 01 Nov / St Helens

During a half-day guided walk, explore stunning Binalong Bay and the Bay of Fires, a coast of white sandy beaches dotted with giant granite boulders. Its landscape of coastal heathlands and woodlands co-mingles with 100 species of birds and wildlife.

The afternoon is at leisure, with the opportunity to embark on a one-hour return walk to St Helens Point where you will find the spectacular Peron Dunes and vast ocean beach overlooking scenic Georges Bay. Dinner tonight is at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

Fri 02 Nov / St Helens – Hobart

Enjoy a leisurely day’s drive along the picturesque East Coast down to Hobart. On the way, stop for a visit to the picturesque port town of Bicheno.Then, explore the Tasmanian Bushland Garden near Orford. This regional botanic garden is devoted to Tasmanian native plants, featuring some of the rare and threatened plants of this region. Continue to Hobart and check in to the hotel, before dinner in a local restaurant. (BD)

 

Sat 03 Nov / Hobart (Huon Valley)

After breakfast, enjoy some free time to explore the iconic Salamanca Market at your own pace. This weekly outdoor market takes place every Saturday and gathers over 300 stallholders from all over Tasmania including creative artisans and talented musicians.

After lunch at a local restaurant, continue to Eggs and Bacon Bay Cottage Garden, located in a sheltered bend of the Huon River. Discover its flowering Tasmanian understory garden before continuing to Crawleighwood Nursery and Garden. Wander between rhododendrons, maple woodlands, Gondwanan rainforest species, rare and unusual plants. Enjoy afternoon tea on the property before returning to Hobart. (BL)

 

Sun 04 Nov / Hobart (Derwent Valley)

After breakfast, depart for Hamilton for a visit to Prospect House and Garden. Admire the elegant early-colonial architecture of the house and half a hectare of colourful gardens.

Continue to New Norfolk, located in the upper Derwent Valley, with lunch at leisure and free time in the town. Visit a private garden in Richmond before returning to Hobart in the late afternoon. (B)

 

Mon 05 Nov / Depart Hobart

In the morning, visit the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens. Begun in 1818, this is Australia’s second oldest botanic garden, this year celebrating its bicentenary. Explore the garden with a guided introductory walk followed by free time to continue at your own pace.

Enjoy a special farewell lunch with Jennifer and fellow travellers.

Tour arrangements conclude after lunch in central Hobart. Make your way to the airport for suggested flights departing from 18:00 onwards. (BL)

 

Gardens of Italy: The Italian Lakes, the Piedmont, Tuscany, Umbria & Rome

Gardens of Italy: The Italian Lakes, the Piedmont, Tuscany, Umbria & Rome

 

**3 rooms remaining**

 

ITINERARY

 

The following itinerary describes a range of gardens, villas and palaces which we plan to visit. Many are accessible to the public, but others require special permission which may only be confirmed closer to the tour’s departure. The daily activities described in this itinerary may change or be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate alterations in opening hours, flight schedules and confirmation of private visits. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents prior to departure. The tour includes breakfast daily, lunches & evening meals indicated in the detailed itinerary where: B=breakfast, L=lunch and D=evening meal.

 

Moltrasio – 2 nights

 

Day 1: Monday 29 April, Arrive Milan – Transfer to Moltrasio

Introductory meeting
Light (2-course) Dinner, La Cascata restaurant

The ASA ‘designated’ flight is scheduled to arrive at Milan’s Malpensa airport in the morning of 30 April. Those arriving on this flight will be transferred by private coach to Moltrasio. If you are travelling independently, you should meet the group at the Grand Hotel Imperiale. Private transfers from the airport to the hotel can be arranged for those arriving independently; please contact ASA for further information.

Grand Hotel Imperiale is situated on the shores of Lake Como with panoramic views of the Grigne Mountains. We shall meet in the evening for a brief introduction to the tour, followed by a light dinner at the hotel’s La Cascata restaurant. (Overnight Moltrasio) D

 

Day 2: Tuesday 30 April, Moltrasio – Tremezzo – Bellagio – Moltrasio

Villa Carlotta, Tremezzo
Villa Melzi, Bellagio (optional)
Villa del Balbianello, Bellagio
Welcome Dinner, Imperialino restaurant

This morning we cruise across Lake Como to 18th-century Villa Carlotta, a garden with a huge botanical collection and a traditional Italian formal design, unlike most lake gardens that were heavily influenced by the more fluid layouts of English landscape gardening; it thus has a wide variety of architectural features – parterres, stairways, ponds, fountains, etc. In April and May Villa Carlotta offers a sea of multi-coloured azaleas shaped in high, rounded cushions alongside the garden paths.

During the lunch break there will be some time at leisure to visit Villa Melzi (optional).

This afternoon we visit Villa del Balbianello, an exquisite villa set in woods of pine, soaring cypress and oak with pollarded plane trees and manicured lawns and flowerbeds. Facing the promontory of Serbelloni, from the Lavedo point it boasts unparalleled views down the three branches of the lake. The first villa was built in 1540, but was later moved to a new site inland to protect it from flooding. Cardinal Durini erected a casino with a loggia in 1790, open to the sun and breezes; today it is trellised with Ficus pumila (creeping fig) and flanked by a library and music room.

This evening we meet in the hotel’s Imperialino restaurant for our Welcome Dinner. (Overnight Moltrasio) BD

 

Stresa – 2 nights

 

Day 3: Wednesday 1 May, Moltrasio – Bisuschio – Casalzuigno – Stresa

Villa Cicogna Mozzoni, Bisuschio
Villa Della Porta Bozzolo, Casalzuigno

We depart Moltrasio to visit Villa Cicogna Mozzoni, located on a steep hillside in the village of Bisuschio. Its garden looks out upon sweeping views, with a glimpse of Lake Lugano. Founded in the 15th century, the villa took its present form in the 16th century. The Cicogna family, who inherited it in 1580, still owns this lovely villa. The formal gardens rise on 7 narrow terraces and adjacent to them is a small sunken garden with formal box parterres and patches of lawn. We tour the villa residence, which houses a fine antique collection. Above the villa is a great terrace with Renaissance grottoes offering shade in summer, and a magnificent water stair. Flowing water was an essential feature of Italian formal gardens, offering a cooling spectacle and a lively, burbling sound.

After lunchtime at leisure we visit Villa Della Porta Bozzolo, which is unusual for Lombardy because its measured stately design is laid out upon a steep slope. Parterres, terraces with stone balustrades and grand stairways flanking fountains rise to an octagonal clearing, or theatre, surrounded by a thick ring of cypresses and woods. The perspective rises further to the villa, set to one side in order not to interrupt the silvan view. We continue to our hotel located on the shores of Lake Maggiore. (Overnight Stresa) B

 

Day 4: Thursday 2 May, Stresa – Lake Maggiore – Lake Orta – Stresa

Isola Bella, Lake Maggiore
Isola Madre, Lake Maggiore
Orta San Giulio & Isola San Giulio, Lake Orta

We take the ferry across Lake Maggiore to Count Carlo Borromeo’s Isola Bella (1632), one of Italy’s most extraordinary Baroque gardens. Located on an island off Stresa, it appears to float like a palatial barge, with 10 terraces rising like a ship’s prow from the reflecting waters. It shares the island with the Borromeo palace and its adjacent village.

We also visit Isola Madre, with semi-tropical plantings amongst which white peacocks roam. In 1845, Flaubert wrote, “Isola Madre is the most sensual place that I have ever seen in the world”. It has a fine swamp cypress, citrus fruit trees, crape myrtle, hibiscus, leptospermum and acacias. The landscape woods have groves of native trees – aromatic cypress, bay and pine – interplanted with camphor, pepper trees and styrax. Its pathways are lined with magnolias, camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas.

This afternoon we visit Lake Orta, to the west of Lake Maggiore, a tiny jewel surrounded by hills and mountains acting as a great natural theatre enveloping local towns and villages. The most beautiful of these is Orta San Giulio, whose town hall has a frescoed façade. Its narrow streets are lined with Rococo houses. We take a ferry to Isola San Giulio to visit the 12th-century Romanesque church whose pulpit is one of the outstanding masterpieces of medieval sculpture in northern Italy. (Overnight Stresa) B

 

Turin – 4 nights

 

Day 5: Friday 3 May, Stresa – Poirino – Turin

Tenuta Banna, Poirino (exclusive private visit; to be confirmed)

This morning we make our way south from Stresa to Poirino, 30 kilometres south-east of Turin. After lunch at a local restaurant in Poirino, we make our way to nearby Tenuta Banna. This private estate is owned by Marchese and Marchesa Spinola and is home to the Spinola-Banna Foundation for Art. In the 1990s Paolo Pejrone, leading Italian landscape architect and host of our program on Day 8 of our tour, designed a modern garden around the property’s large farmhouse and adjoining church and castle. He created a series of enclosed gardens ‘organised like a Persian carpet’; they include a secret garden planted with wisterias and peonies, a potager, and a rose garden with an abundance of colour and variety. Following lunch, we will drive to Turin, Italy’s first capital city after unification and home to the House of Savoy. (Overnight Turin) BL

 

Day 6: Saturday 4 May, Turin

Orientation walk of Turin, including guided visits to the Palazzo Reale, Cathedral & Palazzo Madama
Afternoon and evening at leisure

This morning we will enjoy a guided orientation walk of the city’s centre with a local guide. Our walk will include a visit to Turin’s Palazzo Reale (Royal Palace), seat of the House of Savoy (1646-1859) and of Vittorio Emanuele II, King of Italy (1860-1865). This grand palace, a major essay in Italian Baroque and Rococo, has sumptuous decorations and furniture from all periods. We will also visit Turin’s Palazzo Madama, a medieval castle behind a Baroque façade, with a major art collection that includes Antonello da Messina’s Portrait of a Man. This afternoon and evening we will be at leisure to enjoy Turin. (Overnight Turin) B

 

Day 7: Sunday 5 May, Turin – Moncalieri – Turin

Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli
Villa Silvio Pellico – including lunch (exclusive private visit)

Today we visit the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli. Giovanni Agnelli was in 1899 one of the original founders of what became the Fiat motor company. The Agnelli family, ‘the Kennedys of Italy’, are also known for their ownership of Ferrari since 1969 and as majority owners of the Juventus Football Club. Donna Marella Agnelli, of the Italian noble house of Caracciolo, is a renowned style icon, garden designer, author and photographer, as well as art collector. The Pinacoteca, opened in 2002, displays 25 masterpieces from Giovanni and Marella Agnelli’s private art collection. We shall visit the gallery known as the ‘Scrigno’, or ‘treasure chest’, which houses twenty-three paintings and two sculptures, including works by Matisse, Balla, Severini, Modigliani, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Picasso, Renoir, Manet and Canova. The space itself is a work of art, having been designed by Renzo Piano inside Turin’s historic industrial complex of Lingotto. Our specially-arranged tour allows us a visit to the former Fiat test track on the building’s roof. Our viewing of the Agnellis’ remarkable collection is not only an experience in itself, but also a fitting prelude to tomorrow’s visit to the famous gardens of the Agnelli property at Villar Perosa.

Villa Silvio Pellico, a fine Neo-Gothic mansion (1780) with a Russell Page garden, arguably one of his three masterpieces. Page had gained an understanding of the Italian and French formal tradition of gardening from Edith Wharton and Geoffrey Jellicoe. On an ill-kempt hillside in the 1950s he created a fine terraced garden on two axes divided by pools; Page was particularly sensitive to the use of water in gardens. Symmetrical hedges create a series of ‘rooms’ of different designs, using diverse vegetation and ground patterns, as well as sculptures. The present owner, Raimonda Lanza di Trabia, daughter of the last Prince of Trabia (Sicily), and her husband Emanuele Gamna, will host us for lunch. (Overnight Turin) BL

 

Day 8: Monday 6 May, Turin – Villar Perosa – Revello – Moncalieri – Turin

Program hosted by garden designer Paolo Pejrone (Gardens of Casa Agnelli & Bramafam; to be confirmed)
Gardens of Casa Agnelli at Villar Perosa (exclusive private visit; to be confirmed in 2019)
Bramafam, Paolo Pejrone’s private experimental garden (exclusive private visit; to be confirmed)
Private Garden of Silvana and Alberto Peyrani (exclusive private visit; to be confirmed in 2019)

We are particularly privileged today to accompany Paolo Pejrone on two very special garden visits. This morning we visit the exquisite gardens of Casa Agnelli, set on a private estate which has been home to the Agnelli family since the early 1800s. In 1955 Marella Agnelli commissioned Russell Page and together they transformed the gardens. The swimming pool area was designed by renowned architect Gae Aulenti and other parts of the garden were developed by Paolo Pejrone. The grounds offer a range of styles: Italianate formal gardens; a water garden with interconnecting lakes; an English-style woodland walk, a romantic garden, sculpture gardens and more. We are particularly fortunate to have been granted a visit to this most extraordinary of gardens.

Paolo Pejrone will then accompany us on a visit to his own, very private garden, designed not so much for its aesthetics, but rather as a laboratory in which the master is constantly experimenting with new plantings. Set on a steep escarpment near a ruined medieval rampart from which ‘Bramafam’ takes its name, the garden and its owner’s discussions with you will give precious, unique insights into his ideas and practice.

We continue to Moncalieri to visit the private garden designed by Paolo Pejrone for Silvana and Alberto Peyrani. Pejrone surrounded their villa with extensive new gardens, including decorative orchards and a fine potager. We are very grateful that the Peyranis have graciously consented to allow us to explore their private domain. (Overnight Turin) B

 

Lucca – 2 nights

 

Day 9: Tuesday 7 May, Turin – Santa Margherita Ligure – La Cervara – Lucca

Abbey of San Girolamo al Monte di Portofino (La Cervara)
Group Dinner at Gli Orti di Via Elisa Restaurant

We drive southeast along the grand Ligurian coast to the magnificent Abbey of San Girolamo al Monte di Portofino. Located in a strategic position atop a rocky headland that overlooks the Tigullio Gulf, it was founded as a Benedictine monastery in 1361. The monks’ former vegetable garden was transformed into what is now the only monumental Italian formal garden in the Liguria region. It extends over two levels connected by arbors and steps. On the lower level, hedges of boxwood (buxus sempervirens) are trimmed into ornate stepped cones, an important example of topiary art. The hedges surround a 17th-century marble fountain in the form of a putto, whose underlying basin is tinged with pink water lilies in summer.

After visiting this grand garden, we continue to Lucca and check in to the Hotel Ilaria, which occupies the restored stables of the Villa Bottini inside the city walls. In the evening we dine together at Gli Orti di Via Elisa Restaurant located near the hotel. (Overnight Lucca) BD

 

Day 10: Wednesday 8 May, Lucca

Orientation tour of Lucca incl. Cathedral of San Martino, San Michele, San Frediano and the Piazza del Mercato
Palazzo Pfanner
Afternoon at leisure

Italian Opera Evening at the Church of San Giovanni
Lucca is one of the most beautiful of all Italian cities, with city walls graced by grand plantations of trees and one of the finest sets of Romanesque churches in Italy. We visit the Cathedral of St. Martin, with a lovely Jacopo della Quercia tomb. The Church of San Michele has a spectacular façade made up of complex blind galleries with capricious sculptures of beasts. It was built in the ancient forum of the city; Lucca’s medieval street plan follows the original Roman plan. The oval Piazza del Mercato’s medieval palaces were built into the structure of Lucca’s Roman amphitheatre. San Frediano, meanwhile, has a distinctive façade mosaic and a unique baptismal font that was once a medieval fountain.

After lunch we visit the privately owned 17th-century Palazzo Pfanner, where parts of Portrait of a Lady were filmed (1996). The palace’s owner, Dario Pfanner, will introduce his palace and its Baroque garden, a fine example of an urban garden that includes various statues of Olympian deities and a fountain pond. Its elegant lemon house (limonaia) inflects a space defined by boxwood and laurel hedges. Bushes of peonies and hortensias, roses and potted geraniums gain shade from yews, pines, magnolias and an old camellia. Inside, the palace’s piano nobile (main reception room) features Pietro Paolo Scorsini frescoes (c.1720).

The remainder of the afternoon is at leisure. You may wish to walk a section of Lucca’s 17th-century city walls, the best preserved in Italy. The Lucchesi planted trees atop these walls to form a promenade enlivened by small gardens and lawns. We attend an evening concert with a selection from Italian operas, including some by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), a native of Lucca, in the Church of San Giovanni. (Overnight Lucca) B

 

Florence – 4 nights

 

Day 11: Thursday 9 May, Lucca – Camigliano – Capannori – San Piero a Sieve – Florence

Villa Torrigiani, Camigliano
Lunch at a Tuscan osteria
Medici Castello del Trebbio, San Piero a Sieve

During the Renaissance, the wealthy merchant families of Tuscany built grand villas on the plains of Lucca. We visit 17th-century Villa Torrigiani, named after the camellia that was introduced to the gardens in the early 18th century. The garden’s Baroque layout, attributed to André Le Nôtre, features symmetrical reflecting pools in front of the villa. Most outstanding is the secret garden (Giardino di Flora), with regular beds, topiary and pools. The garden features 19th-century trees, magnificent magnolias, cypresses and umbrella pines. The 18th-century avenue of cypresses leading to the villa from the village of Borgonuovo reflects the past grandeur of estates in this region.

We eat a traditional Tuscan lunch at nearby osteria before continuing our journey eastward toward Castello il Trebbio in San Piero a Sieve.

“Set on a hilltop in the Apennines north of Florence, a few kilometres west of San Piero a Sieve, Castello del Trebbio is one of the oldest villas built by the Medici, who came from the Mugello and chose their native region for their first villas. The head of the Medici clan, Giovanni di Bicci, owned the property from the late 14th century, and upon his death in 1428, the villa was inherited by Cosimo the Elder, who commissioned Michelozzo di Bartolomeo to rebuild the original castle.

Set in an excellent strategic position, dominating the Sieve Valley below and near a cross roads (Trebbio derives from the Latin trivium), the castle was surrounded by woods and a huge estate which bordered on the Cafaggiolo property. Although Vasari suggests otherwise, Trebbio was the first of the Mugello castles to be rebuilt by Michelozzo. Immediately after 1428, the building work began, incorporating the existing watchtower into a solid, compact defensive construction surrounded by a moat and drawbridge. The defensive role was necessary on account of the castle’s position, however novel features were also introduced to satisfy the requirements of the patron.

The walled garden set on two terraces to the right is noteworthy as it was among the first of its kind to be designed for a villa. The upper terrace of the well-preserved garden, a veritable hortus conclusus, is decorated with a long pergola made up of a double row of columns and sandstone capitals in various styles (ionic and decorated with foliage motifs), which support a thick covering of vines. As can be seen in the lunette painted by Giusto Utens between 1599 and 1602, there was a second pergola (now lost) on the lower terrace, which retains the original layout of a vegetable garden with a pond, as well as planting designed by Michelozzo to satisfy not only defensive requirements, but also Cosimo’s spiritual desire for a contemplative life.” (The Medici Villas: Complete Guide by Isabella Lapi Ballerini & Mario Scalini).

In the late afternoon we arrive at our hotel in central Florence. (Overnight Florence) BL

 

Day 12: Friday 10 May, Florence – Fiesole – Florence

Villa Medici in Fiesole
Villa Le Balze (to be confirmed)
Lunch at Fattoria di Maiano
Villa di Maiano & Gardens

Unlike the grand villa gardens we have visited near Lucca, Florence and its vicinity have a number of small intimate urban gardens that we visit today. Many of these offer glimpses of the city, a counterpart to the spectacular views afforded by their grander Florentine counterparts. Such views offer a reminder that Florentine villas were seen as retreats from this metropolitan powerhouse. We make an early morning visit to elegant Fiesole in the hills overlooking Florence where Boccaccio set his Decameron, model for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Boccaccio’s protagonists told stories to while away their days in a Fiesole villa in which they had escaped from the plague ravaging Florence. Our first visit is to the garden of 16th-century Villa Medici in Fiesole. The garden, showing Cecil Pinsent’s influence, is divided into three terraces with a limonaia. We shall then walk to neighbouring Villa Le Balze. Now a University of Georgetown study centre, it has a small formal garden and olive grove designed by Englishman Cecil Pinsent, with breathtaking views over Florence.

After some time to explore Fiesole’s town centre at leisure, we transfer a short distance by coach to nearby Fattoria di Maiano, where we shall partake in a a Tuscan lunch together. The Fattoria is the organic farm and olive grove of Villa di Maiano; here we shall indulge in local specialties such as cheeses, cold cuts, and risotto al Chianti.

The Villa di Maiano can count Queen Victoria among its guests; it has also provided the set for numerous films, including James Ivory’s A Room with a View and Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea with Mussolini. Among the villa’s past owners are members of the famous Sforza and Pazzi families. However, it was wealthy Englishman Sir John Temple Leader who, after acquiring the property in 1844, renovated the villa, its gardens and the surrounding structures. We’ll take a guided tour of the Villa, including a special visit to the first floor, and the Gardens. (Overnight Florence) BL

 

Day 13: Saturday 11 May, Florence

Palazzo Corsini al Prato: Visits to the garden & palazzo; Refreshments
Afternoon at leisure

Today we visit two contrasting palazzi and discover more about the way in which urban Florentines lived. We begin our day with a visit to to the Giardino Corsini al Prato, a Florentine urban garden that illustrates the deep connection between nature, science and beauty in the Renaissance sensibility. Alessandro Acciaioli, a passionate 16th-century botanist, conceived the garden. Unable to finish his residence, he was forced to sell the property to Filippo di Lorenzo Corsini, who completed the Italian garden that remains unchanged to this day. Completely concealed from the street by the façade of the palazzo, this urban garden reveals pink and red rock roses, peonies, cherry trees and lavender along with elegant lemon urns and a central axis of solemn marble statues. After our tour of the gardens, Princess Giorgiana Corsini has kindly arranged for us a tour of her palace, followed by refreshments.

The afternoon is at leisure to explore Florence’s many monuments and museums. (Overnight Florence) B

 

Day 14: Sunday 12 May, Florence

Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi
Museo di San Marco
Afternoon at leisure

We depart from the hotel on foot and make a visit to the Palazzo Medici Riccardi to view Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes of the Procession of the Magi in the small Magi Chapel. The sumptuous procession, which includes representations of Medici family members, is set in an ideal Tuscan landscape, which forms a fascinating comparison to the gardens we visit and countryside through which we drive.

Our next visit is to the monastery of San Marco, where Dominican monks contemplated the faith in images by Fra Angelico. Here, Cosimo de’Medici had his own cell for religious retreats, and commissioned Michelozzo to design the monks’ cloister and the reading library for his manuscripts. The monastery holds numerous artistic treasures, including a Last Supper by Ghirlandaio in the refectory, and Fra Angelico’s famous Annunciation.

We have another afternoon at leisure to enjoy Florence. (Overnight Florence) B

 

Siena – 2 nights

 

Day 15: Monday 13 May, Florence – Settignano – Pianella – Siena

Villa Gamberaia, Settignano
Villa di Geggiano, Pianella – including buffet lunch (exclusive private visit)

We drive to Siena via two famous Tuscan villas. At Settignano we visit the Villa Gamberaia, with arguably the most famous of Florentine villa gardens. The Capponi family initiated the present garden in 1718. In 1896, Princess Ghika of Serbia created the main water parterres in front of the villa. The Marchi family has recently restored the garden. It features magnificent topiary, two fine grottoes, and wonderful old cypresses and pines. By special arrangement, we also tour the interiors of the villa which combines interesting architectural features of both an urban palazzo and suburban villa.

This afternoon we cross to the opposite side of the Sienese hills to the enchanting Villa Geggiano. Here, centuries-old cypress, potted lemons and clipped box hedges adorn a garden boasting a unique ‘greenery theatre’, late Baroque sculptures, a kitchen garden with topiary art and a semi-circular fishpond that forms an elegant terrace overlooking Siena. The villa itself contains original 13th-century furnishings. A small chapel faces the garden. Lunch features crostini with porcini mushrooms and truffles, pasta, various locally cured meats and Pecorino cheeses, followed by plum jam tart, all washed down with Villa di Geggiano Chianti Classico, mineral water and coffee.

In the afternoon we continue to our hotel on the outskirts of Siena, a villa surrounded by gardens. (Overnight Siena) BL

 

Day 16: Tuesday 14 May, Siena

Orientation tour of Siena, including Palazzo Pubblico, Cathedral & Museum
Afternoon at leisure

Siena is the quintessential medieval city. We explore Lorenzetti’s fascinating paintings of Good and Bad Government in the Civic Museum, located in the Palazzo Pubblico, and Duccio’s masterpiece, the Maestà, in the Cathedral Museum. We examine Nicola and Giovanni Pisano’s great pulpit in Siena Cathedral. We also visit medieval quarters (contrade) dominated by palaces still occupied by the families who built them. The contrade compete in the famous palio horse race twice a year. Protected by the Virgin Mary, Siena is a city of Trinitarian symbolism. Built on three ridges, it has three major sectors (terzi) that each elected three members of the city council, and interpreted its very architectural fabric in such symbolic terms. The afternoon is at leisure to explore Siena’s many monuments and museums. (Overnight Siena) B

 

Perugia – 1 night

 

Day 17: Wednesday 15 May, Siena – Chianciano Terme – Castel del Piano Umbro – Perugia

Villa La Foce, Chianciano Terme (by special appointment; to be confirmed)
Private gardens of Villa Aureli, Castel del Piano Umbro
Orientation Walk, Perugia, including Cathedral & Fontana Maggiore

We drive south to the Renaissance Villa La Foce, home of Iris Origo, author of the famous Merchant of Prato. Origo’s two autobiographies, Images and Shadows and War in Val d’Orcia, vividly describe life on the estate in the mid-20th century. La Foce overlooks the Orcia valley and Amiata Mountains, maintaining a distinctive harmony between its spectacular landscape setting and the formal style of surrounding gardens. Terraces with cherries, pines, cypress and wild herbs gently climb its hillside setting. Now a centre for cultural and artistic activities, it hosts the distinguished Incontri chamber annual summer music festival in the Castelluccio, a medieval castle on the property.

Count Sperello di Serego Alighieri, a descendent of Dante, will host us for a light lunch and show us his lovely Villa Aureli. Shaded by lime trees and oaks and decorated with many late antique vases containing citrus trees, the villa dates to the middle of the 18th century, when a Perugian nobleman and artist, Count Sperello Aureli, transformed a 16th-century tower into his country residence. Of particular note is the orangery, whose high roof is reminiscent of the hull of an upturned ship.

We continue to Perugia for a gentle orientation walk to include its Cathedral and Fontana Maggiore. We spend the night in the luxury Hotel Brufani Palace, located on a hilltop within Perugia’s historic core. (Overnight Perugia) BL

 

Viterbo – 1 night

 

Day 18: Thursday 16 May, Perugia – Bagnaia – Viterbo

Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia
Villa Lante, Bagnaia

We begin by viewing masterpieces, including works by Perugino, in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria before departing Perugia to visit the great Villa Lante and its garden. Villa Lante is the consummate example of Italian Mannerist garden design. Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s exemplary essay in fine scale and proportion centres on a fountain and water parterre. Vignola was influenced by the Vatican gardens, the Villa d’Este, Hadrian’s marine theatre and the Boboli Gardens (Florence). Its theme, humanity’s descent from the Golden Age, is based upon Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Water flows from the Grotto of the Deluge at the summit down a stepped cascade and through a channel at the centre of a vast stone table used for banquets, inspired by Pliny’s description of an imperial garden table using water to cool wine and fruit. In the late afternoon, we drive a short distance to our hotel located in the countryside outside Viterbo. (Overnight Viterbo) BD

 

Rome – 4 nights

 

Day 19: Friday 17 May, Viterbo – Calcata – Vignanello – Rome

Gardens of Paolo Portoghesi, Calcata (exclusive private visit; to be confirmed)
Castello Ruspoli, Vignanello

This morning we visit the private garden of distinguished architect and scholar Paolo Portoghesi. The garden reinterprets Baroque elements and Borrominian forms, and fuses geometry with nature to produce a garden which is both spectacularly modern and at the same time, reverent toward the traditions upon which it draws.

Castello Ruspoli occupies the site of a mid-9th century Benedictine convent later converted to a military stronghold. Ortensia Baglioni transformed it into a villa, designed by the great architects Sangallo and Vignola, and succeeding generations created one of Italy’s most beautiful parterres, composed of hedges of bay, laurel and box, which articulate a vast rectangular space. The Princess Ruspoli today maintains the gardens. (Overnight Rome) B

 

Day 20: Saturday 18 May, Rome – Ninfa – Cisterna – Rome

Giardini di Ninfa
Private Gardens of Torrecchia Vecchia (to be confirmed)

We depart this morning at approximately 8.00am for the Giardini di Ninfa. The magnificent gardens of Ninfa, south of Rome, are some of the most remarkable in all of Italy. Today, their gates will open for a special private visit for our group. The town of Ninfa is but a memory of a once prosperous medieval commune owned by the Caetani family since the mid-13th century. In the early 20th century the family began to regenerate its ruins, taking advantage of a microclimate greened by rich spring water. Thousands of species were introduced from all over the world under the guidance of botanical experts. Lelia Caetani, the last of her ancient family, died in 1977 and bequeathed her property to the Foundation Caetani that maintains the wonderfully atmospheric gardens. Today plants weave themselves over ruined towers, ancient archways and churches, while ducks and swans glide on the castle’s moat. Highlights include a walled garden, small orchard and diverse plantings in which roses, banana trees and maples thrive together in this unique and beautiful landscape.

Nearby, we enjoy a picnic lunch and visit the dreamy gardens of Torrecchia, one of Italy’s most beautiful private gardens. Nestled against the crumbling ruins of a medieval village and castle, perched on a volcanic hilltop just south of Rome, they command spectacular views of the unspoilt 1500-acre estate. Owned by Carlo Caracciolo (the late owner of the Italian newspaper L’Espresso) and Violante Visconti, the gardens were originally designed by Lauro Marchetti, the current curator of the Giardini di Ninfa, and further developed by the English garden designer Dan Pearson and later by Stuart Barfoot. (Overnight Rome) BL

 

Day 21: Sunday 19 May, Rome – Tivoli – Rome

Villa d’Este, Tivoli
Group Lunch at Ristorante Sibilla, Tivoli
Time at leisure in Rome

Set among the hanging cliffs of the Valle Gaudente, the Villa d’Este and its surrounding gardens and waterworks has undergone a series of innovative extensions in layout and decoration, including those of Bernini in the late 17th century. This UNESCO world heritage site boasts an impressive concentration of nymphaea, grottoes and fountains, including the famous hydraulic Organ Fountain that still operates. The Villa d’Este’s use of water and music became the definitive model for Mannerist and Baroque gardens across Europe.

We remain in the town of Tivoli for lunch at Ristorante Sibilla, a famous restaurant specialising in regional dishes. Marble plaques on the walls list the members of royalty and other famous people who have come here to dine for more than 250 years. After lunch, we return to Rome to enjoy time at leisure. (Overnight Rome) BL

 

Day 22: Monday 20 May, Rome – Castel Giuliano – Ladispoli – Rome

Palazzo Patrizi, Castel Giuliano (exclusive private visit)
Farewell Lunch at The Cesar Restaurant, La Posta Vecchia Hotel, home of the late J. Paul Getty (to be confirmed)

The estate of Castel Giuliano, surrounded by a beautiful century-old park, occupies the site of an Etruscan and Roman settlement at the foot of the Tolfa Mountains. The Patrizi family has owned it since 1546 and its present owners have restored its ancient buildings and park to their former splendour. On its wide, gently sloping turf terraces, pines, cluster oaks, and century-old Lebanon cedars tower above sweet-scented herbs and flower-laden bushes, contrasting unruly nature with human interventions. The park has numerous Etruscan tombs and ruins of Roman walls covered in ferns and lichen. Truly unique, it is one of Italy’s most important private rose gardens; in May it hosts the famous ‘Festival of the Roses’. Climbing roses soften the austere lines of the ancient castle walls, which are surrounded by combinations of shrubbery and foxglove, myrtle and pale blue ceanothus.

We finish our tour with a special dining experience at The Cesar restaurant. With a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, The Cesar is the restaurant of luxury hotel La Posta Vecchia. The dishes, designed by renowned chef Antonio Magliulo, are traditional Italian style with a contemporary twist. They are prepared with fresh local ingredients, including produce from the property’s organic garden. The opulent villa, which houses the hotel, is richly furnished, decorated with precious artwork and surrounded by manicured gardens. It was bought by J. Paul Getty in the 1960s and sumptuously restored. Built in the 17th century to house visitors to the neighbouring Odescalchi Castle, the villa remained in a state of disrepair for decades until Getty purchased it and restored it to its former glory. During excavations for a swimming pool, the foundations of an ancient Roman villa – said to be the weekend retreat of Julius Caesar – were discovered, and Getty spared no expense in preserving the remains. On the lower level of the villa is a museum in which the mosaic floors, walls, pottery and first-century artefacts are on display. We take a stroll around this extraordinary property and say our farewells as we return to Rome. (Overnight Rome) BL

 

Day 23: Tuesday 21 May, Depart Rome

Airport transfer for participants departing on the ASA ‘designated’ flight
The tour ends in Rome. Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer to the airport to take their flight home to Australia. Alternatively, you may wish to extend your stay in Italy. Please contact ASA if you require further assistance. B

 

Physical Endurance & Practical Information

Physical Rating

The number of flags is a guide to the degree of difficulty of ASA tours relative to each other (not to those of other tour companies). It is neither absolute nor literal. One flag is given to the least taxing tours, seven to the most. Flags are allocated, above all, according to the amount of walking and standing each tour involves. Nevertheless, all ASA tours require that participants have a good degree of fitness enabling 2-3 hours walking or 1-1.5 hours standing still on any given site visit or excursion. Many sites are accessed by climbing slopes or steps and have uneven terrain.

 

This 23-day Cultural Garden Tour of Italy involves:

Moderate walking and standing during site visits; walking tours may include steep slopes, flights of stairs, cobbled streets, visits to hill-top towns and uneven ground during garden visits.
Moderate travel by air-conditioned coach.
Visiting a range of towns and villages on foot, walks uphill from bus parks to historic town centres and other sites
The use of audio headsets which amplify the voice of your guide (despite noisy surroundings). This technology also allows you to move freely during site visits without missing any information.
3- to 5-star hotels with eight hotel changes.
You must be able to carry your own hand luggage. Hotel porterage includes 1 piece of luggage per person.
Excursions by ferry in the northern Italian Lakes District.
It is important to remember that ASA programs are group tours, and slow walkers affect everyone in the group. As the group must move at the speed of the slowest member, the amount of time spent at a site may be reduced if group members cannot maintain a moderate walking pace. ASA tours should not present any problem for active people who can manage day-to-day walking and stair-climbing. However, if you have any doubts about your ability to manage on a program, please ask your ASA travel consultant whether this is a suitable tour for you.

Please note: it is a condition of travel that all participants agree to accept ASA’s directions in relation to their suitability to participate in activities undertaken on the tour, and that ASA retains the sole discretion to direct a tour participant to refrain from a particular activity on part of the tour. For further information please refer to the ASA Reservation Application Form.

Practical Information

Prior to departure, tour members will receive practical notes which include information on visa requirements, health, photography, weather, clothing and what to pack, custom regulations, bank hours, currency regulations, electrical appliances and food. The Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade website has advice for travellers: www.smartraveller.gov.au

Natural Landscapes and Gardens of Morocco

Natural Landscapes and Gardens of Morocco

 

**WAITLISTED**

Tour Highlights

 

In Tangier, spend two days visiting a variety of private gardens and learn about the world of Moroccan interiors.
While based in a charming dar in Taroudant for 5 days, view the work of French landscape designers Arnaud Maurières and Éric Ossart, exploring their garden projects designed for a dry climate.
View the stunning garden of Umberto Pasti, a well-known Italian novelist and horticulturalist, whose garden is a ‘magical labyrinth of narrow paths, alleyways and walled enclosures’.
Enjoy lunch at the private residence of Christopher Gibbs, a British antique dealer and collector who was also an influential figure in men’s fashion and interior design in 1960s London. His gorgeous cliff-side compound is set in 14 acres of plush gardens.
In Marrakesh, visit Yves Saint Laurent Museum, Jardin Majorelle and Bergé’s private gardens at Villa Oasis, the Jardin Secret, the palmeraie Jnane Tamsna, André Heller’s Anima, Beldi Country Club and take afternoon tea in the gardens of La Mamounia – one of the most famous hotels in the world.
Wander through the UNESCO World Heritage-listed medinas of Fes and Tetouan.
Delight all your senses in Marrakesh’s teeming, colourful souqs, with their textiles, jewellery, carpets, carved woodwork, acrobats, snake charmers, letter writers and fortune tellers.
Journey across the pre-Sahara and through huge date palm plantations of verdant oasis river valleys.
Encounter the rich urban architecture of Andalusian mosques and madrasas, and desert mud-brick qasbas and villages.
Cross Morocco’s majestic Middle, High and Anti Atlas mountain ranges and past small Berber mountain villages.
Eat fine local food in old palaces whilst listening to exquisite Andalusian music.
Stay in charming riads in Fes and in Marrakesh – lovingly restored by local artisans and located in the medina.

 

22-day Cultural Garden Tour of Morocco

 

Overnight Rabat (1 night) • Tangier (3 nights) • Chefchaouen (1 night) • Fes (3 nights) • Merzouga (1 night) • Tineghir (1 night) • Ouarzazate (1 night) • Marrakesh (5 nights) • Taroudant (5 nights)

 

Overview

 

This 22-day cultural garden tour of Morocco is led by Stephen Ryan, horticulturalist and nurseryman. The tour explores the dynamic relationship between Morocco’s unique and diverse environments and the country’s gardening traditions. It focuses on five key themes: the tradition of the Andalusian courtyard garden; the cultivation of date plantations and palmeraies in the desert and in the south around Marrakesh; the creation of ecologically sustainable desert gardens; the cultivation of gardens and plantations in high mountain locations, and the innovations of expatriates in garden design. We travel from the rich, well-watered coastal plain across the Atlas mountains to the arid pre-Sahara, and then south for our six-day program to study landscape design projects by Arnaud Maurières and Éric Ossart and the ecology of the Taroudant region. In the grand, medieval Imperial cities of Fes and Marrakesh we will be introduced not only to traditional ‘Andalusian’ courtyard gardens but also to the latest in garden design. In cosmopolitan Tangiers, Morocco’s equivalent of the Côte d’Azur, we explore the wonderful houses and gardens of international expatriates. Beyond the Atlas Mountains we encounter rich palm oases that follow rivers as they snake through the empty desert. These extraordinary ‘rivers of green’ are complemented by luscious vegetable gardens in small villages. Here we learn how precious water is shared amongst the village farmers. We stay in a desert house before crossing the High Atlas to Marrakesh, the red city of the south. Here we enjoy extraordinary gardens like that of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé in which verdant plants contrast with vivid blue buildings. Further south we encounter powerful contrasts between lowland and mountain plantings, observing many of Morocco’s unique flora as well as imported and acclimatised specimens. We’ll also come to understand how traditional architecture relates to its garden armature, and how contemporary architects, gardeners and plantsmen have adapted traditional relationships to create new, fascinating environments. To complement this fascinating study of the relationship between diverse ecologies and garden design, we’ll learn about the unique history of Morocco, its artistic and architectural traditions. Fes is arguably the least changed medieval city in the world, with lovely 15th-century madrasas and funduks (caravanserai). In exploring Morocco’s vivid craft traditions, we’ll learn how traditional plant dyes are used in carpets, textiles, the colouring of leather and in painting. We’ll come to understand the vital influence of Iberia upon Morocco’s development and how the countries six great dynasties, the Idrissi, Almoravids, Almohads, Merinids, Sa’adi and Alawi have interacted with Mediterranean Europe. We’ll wander through souqs selling all manner of wares from fine copper to carved wood, textiles, ceramics and Morocco’s ubiquitous carpets and also have ample opportunities to sample Morocco’s fine cuisine in a number of carefully selected restaurants.

 

Preliminary Itinerary

 

Garden visits to be confirmed later in 2019
The detailed itinerary provides an outline of the proposed daily program. Participants should note that the daily activities described in this itinerary may be rotated and/or modified in order to accommodate changes in opening hours, road conditions, flight schedules etc. Participants will receive a final itinerary together with their tour documents. Meals included in the tour price are indicated in the detailed itinerary where: B= breakfast, L= light lunch or picnic lunch and D= evening meal.

 

Rabat – 1 night

 

Day 1: Tuesday 19 March, Arrive Casablanca – Rabat

Arrival transfer from Casablanca to Rabat
Welcome Dinner at the Hotel
Our tour commences in Rabat. Upon arrival in Casablanca, participants taking ASA’s ‘designated’ flight will drive by private coach to our hotel in Rabat, the capital of Morocco. Those taking alternative flights should meet the group at Casablanca airport or at the Farah Rabat Hotel. Tonight we enjoy a welcome dinner at the hotel. (Overnight Rabat) D

 

Tangier – 3 nights

 

Day 2: Wednesday 20 March, Rabat – Tangier

Royal Palace (exterior)
Hassan Tower
Marinid Necropolis of Chellah
Welcome Drinks at a private residence with interior designer François Gilles, Tangier
Rabat is situated on the southern bank of the Bu Regreg River, across from the town of Salé. A Roman town existed in the vicinity but modern Rabat is a Muslim foundation. The name ‘Rabat’ comes from the Arabic word ribat, which means a fort on the Islamic frontier, usually manned by Muslims as a religious duty. Such a fort existed on the site of modern Rabat by the 10th century. Rabat’s earliest monuments built after the Romans, however, date from the Almohad period (1147-1248). The Almohads expanded the settlement by building a qasba (kasbah), or fortress, during the reign of ‘Abd al-Mu’min, the second leader of the Almohad movement. ‘Abd al-Mu’min’s grandson, Ya’qub al-Mansur, transformed Rabat into his capital by constructing a six-kilometre defensive wall around the town, and initiating the construction of the huge Hassan Mosque.

We begin today with a visit to the Hassan Mosque and view the exterior of the Royal Palace. The official residence of King Hassan II of Morocco, this sumptuous building is constructed upon the ruins of an 18th-century palace. It is surrounded by vast lawns with various trees and brilliantly coloured flower beds.

All that remains of the Hassan Mosque is a series of huge columns from its hypostyle prayer hall and the huge Hassan Tower, originally the mosque’s minaret. The vast size of the Hassan Mosque gives a measure of the ambition of its founder, the Almohad Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur; when he died, the mosque, which would have been the largest in the world, was never completed. The minaret (1195-1196), stands to the north of the mosque’s forecourt on an axis with its mihrab in order to emphasise the mosque’s orientation. It was meant to be one of the highest minarets in the world, although its upper section was never built. The Hassan Tower, with the beautiful decorative screen-work on its upper façade, provided the model for the Giralda of Seville and the minaret of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh. The mausoleum of Muhammad V, an example of modern Moroccan architecture, is located at the south end of the Hassan Mosque site.

We then visit the Chellah, a medieval fortified necropolis built on the ruins of the Roman town. Inside are beautifully landscaped gardens with hundreds of flowers that come into bloom during springtime. The result is an amazing variety of scents. We may also view Roman ruins and the remains of a small mosque and madrasa.

Following lunch at a local seafood restaurant we drive from Rabat to Tangier where we shall spend the next three nights at the Hotel El Minzah. Built in the 1930s, this beautiful hotel is decorated in the traditional Moorish style and is surrounded by ample gardens.

Tangier is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Morocco. Founded by the Phoenicians (c.1100 BC) it was subsequently incorporated into the Roman Empire as Tingis, capital of the province of Mauretania Tingitania. With Rome’s decline (4th century AD) it became the only surviving Roman town of any consequence in Morocco. Temporarily lost during the Vandal invasions, Tingis was recaptured by the Byzantines in the 6th century.

In the late 7th century, Tingis was captured by Muslim armies and transformed into the garrison and port of Tangier. It served as a stepping-stone for Muslim attacks on the Iberian peninsula (Spain & Portugal). When the Castilians and Portuguese eventually reconquered Iberia and began attacking north Africa, Tangier became a regular victim of Portuguese raids and was finally captured late in the 15th century. The Portuguese monarchy ceded it to Britain in the 17th century as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza, wife of Charles II. But the expense of retaining Tangier against constant Muslim attacks persuaded the British to withdraw in 1684 and Tangier again became a Muslim city. Morocco’s ‘Alawi dynastly added new defences and a qasba and Tangier became a small port trading with Cadiz and other Spanish ports. In the 19th century, Tangier became the ‘City of the Consuls’, the residence of European diplomats and it became an ‘international zone’ in the early 20th century during the French Protectorate. Tangier gained a shady reputation for espionage, prostitution and drug-smuggling. Since Independence in 1956 the city has been gradually re-integrated into the Moroccan cultural mainstream, although it still has a large expatriate community, especially of writers, artists and gardeners.

This evening we enjoy welcome drinks with François Gilles. François is a London-based interior designer who has been sourcing Moroccan textiles for over 30 years. Designer and decorator, Laure Welfling and the painter, sculptor and bohemian ‘Gipi’ de Richemont Salvy are kindly opening their ornately decorated Palace in the Medina to host the welcome event. We return the Hotel El Minzah for our evening meal. (Overnight Tangier) BLD

 

Day 3: Thursday 21 March, Tangier

Cape Malabata
American Legation
Palace Moulay Hafid, Mersha
Lunch at the Hôtel Nord-Pinus
Dar Al Makhzan Museum
Afternoon tea in the private gardens of Jean Marc Collinet and Richard Delabaume
When, in 1923, Tangier was declared an international zone the city began to attract artists, poets, and philosophers, much as the Côte d’Azur did on the other side of the Mediterranean. Henri Matisse, William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Paul and Jane Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith and Allen Ginsberg were all inspired by Tangier. Foreign residents, many of them artists, today own some of its most stylish homes. Foreign residents include the English antiques expert Christopher Gibbs, the Italian interior designer Roberto Peregalli and the American garden designer Madison Cox. “It is alarming,” Truman Capote wrote, “the number of travellers who have landed here on a brief holiday, then settled down and let the years go by”.

In the company of François Gilles, we begin the day at Cape Malabata, located 6 miles east of Tangier, for a morning view (with the sun behind us) of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Returning to the heart of Tangier, we take a short tour through the old town where traces of Tangier’s intimate relations with Europe abound. Many consular buildings, such as the American Legation, dot its narrow streets and its architectural styles bear witness to ongoing northern Mediterranean influence.

The American legation is an elaborate Moorish-style building of stuccoed masonry. This complex structure contains the two storey mud and stone building presented to the United States in 1821 by Sultan Moulay Suliman. The first property acquired abroad by the United States government, it housed the United States Legation and Consulate for 140 years, the longest period any building abroad has been occupied as a United States diplomatic post.

Today it is the Tangier American Institute for Moroccan Studies, a museum and cultural centre for the study of Morocco and Morocco-United States relations. The museum holds an impressive display of paintings that give a view of the Tangerine past through the eyes of its artists, most notably Scotsman James McBey, whose hypnotic painting of his servant girl, Zohra, has been called the Moroccan Mona Lisa. There is also a wing dedicated to the expatriate writer and composer Paul Bowles.

We then visit the renovated Palace Moulay Hafid, considered the most beautiful historical monument in Tangier. Also known as the ‘Palace of Italian institutions’, Moulay Hafid’s palace is today admired for its beautiful garden with old trees, its large patio with a gorgeous marble fountain and stucco salons.

This palace was built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Sultan Moulay Hafid. He wanted his palace to be a masterpiece of Moorish architecture also known for its beautiful gardens. The namesake of the palace, the sultan, never lived in his grand palace as he was forced into exile in France upon signing the treaty of Fez on 30 March 1912. This treaty would see Morocco become a French protectorate, and Moulay Hafid’s abdication and forced exile to France. The sultan did however demand the completion of this palace as a condition of his signing the deed of protectorate and construction was completed in late 1912.

Following lunch at Hôtel Nord-Pinus, a renovated pasha’s palace overlooking Tangier’s old port, we visit the Dar Al Makhzan Museum of Moroccan Arts located in the ‘Alawi governor’s residence and its Andalusian garden.

We finish the day in the magnificent gardens of French expatriates Jean Marc Collinet and Richard Delabaume. (Overnight Tangier) BL

Day 4: Friday 22 March, Tangier

Cape Spartel Lighthouse
Rock Lodge, private residence of Jonathan Dawson
Private gardens of Umberto Pasti
Lunch at the private residence of Christopher Gibbs
Private gardens of Veere Greeney
Afternoon tea at the private residence of Daniel Aron
We spend another day with François Gilles visiting private gardens in the lush hills of the area known as la Montagne. It is here that foreign home owners such as Madison Cox tend their magnificent gardens; Tangier is a landscaper’s paradise because just about any plant will thrive here.

We begin with a short drive to Cape Spartel, which lies 14 kilometres west of Tangier. This is the northwestern extremity of Africa’s Atlantic Coast. A dramatic drive takes us through la Montagne and over the pine-covered headland to the Cape Spartel Lighthouse. Nearby, we visit Rock Lodge, a cottage renovated by Jonathan Dawson, the Australian-born architecture and design journalist. The house is bursting with pictures, rugs, books and maps. In his courtyard garden, bougainvillea and honeysuckle share the space with liana and moonflower.

In the Nouvelle-Montagne we visit the stunning residence and garden of Umberto Pasti, a well-known Italian novelist and horticulturalist. Pasti’s garden is a magical labyrinth of narrow paths, alleyways and walled enclosures. Plants of eucalyptus, palms and bitter orange trees provide peaceful shade from the burning rays of the Moroccan sun. Lush vegetation, fountains and frog song are the only sign of life in this world of tranquility.

Nearby, in the Vieille-Montagne (‘old mountain’), lunch will be served at the private residence of Christopher Gibbs, a British antique dealer and collector who was also an influential figure in men’s fashion and interior design in 1960s London. His gorgeous cliff-side compound, which is set in 14 acres of plush gardens, includes a century-old water garden. Garden designer Sabrina Hahn describes the garden as: “A lovely free flowing garden with lots of greenery, palms, murraya and iceberg roses hedging and spring flowering perennials. Pots are filled with geranium Maderense, hollyhocks and gaura.”

Across the road, we visit the home of Veere Greeney, a New Zealand born interior designer, whose garden provides a unique view of Gibraltar. In this garden, long paved avenues are edged with very old transplanted olive trees. Hardy perennials like sage, helichrysum, perennial salvias euphorbia and large urns are filled with geraniums and annuals.

We finish the day with a visit to the garden of award-winning French photographer Daniel Aron, known for his visuals of the Hermes brand and work for Harper’s Bazaar (USA), Vogue France, House and Garden (USA) and Elle (France). (Overnight Tangier) BL

 

Chefchaouen – 1 night

 

Day 5: Saturday 23 March, Tangier – Tetouan – Chefchaouen

Medina of Tetouan
The Royal Artisan School, Tetouan (Dar Sanaa)
Old Town of Chefchaouen
Today we travel along the picturesque mountain road from Tangier to Chefchaouen, a small town nestling in a deep, narrow valley at the western end of the Rif mountains, where we spend the night.

We break our journey in the city of Tetouan, situated on the slopes of the fertile Martil Valley. Tetouan, from the Berber word tit’ta’ouin means ‘springs’, which explains the greenery of the town, its many fountains, its flowering gardens and its surrounding fertile plains. The city was of particular importance from the 8th century onwards as it served as the main point of contact between Morocco and Andalusia. After the Spanish Reconquest, the town was rebuilt by Andalusian refugees who had been expelled by Isabella and Ferdinand (1492). This is reflected in its art and architecture, which reveal clear Andalusian influences.

Tetouan’s ancient walled medina is a UNESCO World Heritage site whose houses reflect a rich aristocratic tradition. Their tiled lintels, wrought-iron balconies, courtyard gardens and extravagant interiors have a lot in common with the old Muslim quarters of Córdoba or Seville. Despite subsequent conquests, the medina has remained largely intact and one of the most complete in Morocco. Inside the medina proper are most of Tetouan’s food and crafts souqs, including the Souk el-Hots where Berber rugs and foutas (woven cotton cloth) are sold. Throughout Morocco we will find carpets, textiles and leather that are dyed with natural pigments that are derived from indigenous plants. Deftly woven carpets, expertly crafted leatherwork, intricately carved woodwork, superbly tooled metal work, colourful tiles and exquisite ceramics are all to be found in Tetouan. We visit Dar Sanaa, the Royal Artisan School where local children are apprenticed to masters for 4 years of intense training in traditional artisan work (this school is typically closed on weekends, but we can still visit its workshops).

‘Chefchaouen’ is a Berber name, meaning ‘two horns’, which refers to two rocky peaks that dominate the town. The town was founded in the 15th century by a descendant of the Prophet, called Mawlay ‘Ali ibn Rashid, and refugees from Spain who sought to create a mountain stronghold where they would be safe at last from the Christians. Around 1760 Sultan Mohammed Ben Abdallah (Mohammed III) ordered the Jewish families to move into the medina, their mellah (walled Jewish quarter of a city) taking in the area that today encompasses the southern quarter between the qasba and Bab el Aïn. Until this century, Chefchaouen was completely closed to Europeans, who risked their lives if they tried to enter its gates.

The Hispanic origin of Chefchaouen’s inhabitants is clearly evident in the architecture of this little town which has much in common with villages of southern Spain. Small, whitewashed ochre houses with balconies, windows covered by ornate metal grilles, tiled roofs and Andalusian-style courtyards, pile up upon one another. Chefchaouen’s famous shades of blue arose when the Jews added indigo into the whitewash to contrast the mellah against the traditional green of Islam. The town’s stone-built Friday mosque resembles rural Spanish churches. The focus of town life is the central plaza where the inhabitants promenade in the balmy dusk air. In the early evening there will be an optional walk to explore the old town of Chefchaouen. (Overnight Chefchaouen) BLD

 

Fes – 4 nights

 

Day 6: Sunday 24 March, Chefchaouen – Volubilis – Fes

Roman Site of Volubilis
Today we travel south from Chefchaouen to Fes via Volubilis. The Roman city of Volubilis was built in the 1st century BC on the site of earlier Prehistoric and Phoenician settlements when Morocco and Algeria were incorporated into the Roman Empire as the client kingdom of Mauretania. The kingdom was ruled by Juba II, the Roman-educated son of its vanquished Berber ruler. Juba II was a classmate of both Octavian and Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Antony and Cleopatra. When Octavian became Augustus, he married Juba II to Cleopatra Selene, and made them client rulers of Mauretania. They founded two capitals: Iol Caesarea in Eastern Algeria and Volubilis in Morocco. The wealth of Volubilis was based on local production of grain, olive oil and copper which were exported to the rest of the empire.

In 40 AD Caligula had Juba’s son, Ptolemy, assassinated. Mauretania went into revolt only to be formally annexed to Rome and made into the directly-governed province of Mauretania Tingitania. The wealth of Volubulis’ agricultural hinterland ensured its ongoing importance to the Romans. Despite the shrinking Roman presence in Morocco from the 3rd century onwards, Volubilis probably remained partly Romanised until the 7th century.

We visit the ruins of Volubilis, which is set in broad wheat bearing plains as it was in the Roman period. Its monuments include the well-preserved Basilica and Arch of Caracalla and there is a fine collection of very important Roman mosaic floors. We also explore the the House of Orpheus, the Baths of Gallienus, the Forum, the Temple of Saturn and a number of houses. From Volubilis we travel southeast into the fertile Sais plain to the city of Fes, where we shall spend the next few nights. (Overnight Fes) BLD

 

 

Introduction to Fes

Fes is the oldest of Morocco’s imperial cities and is still its historic religious and cultural centre. Fes is actually composed of three discrete entities: Fes al-Bali (old Fes), wedged into the narrow valley of the Wad Fes (River Fes); Fes al-Jadid (New Fes), originally a royal complex; and the Ville Nouvelle (New Town), the modern French-built section of the city.

Fes al-Bali, was founded by Idris I around 799. His son, Idris II made Fes his capital in 809 and its population was swelled by immigrants from other Arabo-Islamic lands. Fes soon became an important centre for religious scholarship, commerce and artisanship. Fes benefited from its position at the juncture of land trade routes to and from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic east.

The 11th-12th century Almoravid dynasty conquered North Morocco and incorporated Muslim Spain into its empire. Although the Almoravids founded Marrakesh as their capital in 1070, they also built mosques, baths, funduqs (multi-storey lodging houses for merchants and their wares), and fountains in Fes. Many Hispano-Muslim artisans moved to Fes to work on Almoravid buildings, which were renowned for their stuccowork decoration.

After 1154 the Almohads gave the city new walls which still define the limits of Fes al-Bali to the present day. The Qarawiyyin Mosque could now hold approximately 20,000 worshippers. The Qarawiyyin is quite different to Hispano-Muslim mosques and medieval European cathedral architecture for despite its vast size it hides within the narrow streets of the city and has no defined exterior or monumental façade.

In the 1240s the Marinid dynasty replaced the Almohads and fought against the Christians in Spain. Moroccan rulers henceforth dedicated themselves to holy war (jihad) against the aggressive Christians. Much of Fes’ exquisite architecture dates from the Marinid period (13th-15th century). They amalgamated Moroccan and Hispanic elements in a style subsequently known as ‘Andalusian’, which remains dominant in Fes and other Moroccan cities to this day. The Marinids built the royal complex of Fes al-Jadid which included palaces, mosques and residential quarters for the sultan’s troops. They commissioned a series of palaces and funduqs in Fes al-Bali and introduced the ‘madrasa’ or theological college to Morocco, constructing a series of wonderful madrasas in Fes. These madrasas have a central courtyard, a prayer hall, and several storeys of student rooms wrapped around the courtyard and prayer hall. They are all decorated in the distinctive registers of carved cedarwood, stuccowork, and mosaic tile, a hallmark of the Moroccan Andalusian style. The Marinids also created the shrine of Idris II.

In the 15th century Morocco broke up into small principalities ruled by strong men able to resist Spanish and Portuguese aggression. Fes’ cultural and commercial life was nevertheless enriched by Jewish and Hispano-Muslim migrants fleeing Spain. Fes consequently maintained its religious and cultural importance despite the 16th-century Sa’di dynasty’s choice of Marrakesh as their capital. The ‘Alawi sultans also recognised the importance of Fes and added palaces, fortifications and the Jewish quarter (mellah).

 

Day 7: Monday 25 March, Fes

Burj al-Janub
Al-Andalus Mosque
Sahrij Madrasa
The Dyers’ Street
The Tanneries
Souqs of Fes
Lunch at Le Jardin des Biehn
Dinner at La Maison Bleue
We start today with a visit to the Burj al-Janub, or South Tower, which gives a panoramic view of Fes from the alternate side to the North Tower. We then explore Fes al-Bali visiting the al-Andalus quarter; Marinid madrasas in the city; areas of artisanal production and the souqs, or markets.

The al-Andalus quarter lies on the eastern side of the Wad Fes, and has its own great mosque with a dramatic monumental gateway with a horseshoe arch. One of the most beautiful Marinid madrasas in Morocco, the Sahrij Madrasa, is located close by. The small, perfectly proportioned courtyard of the madrasa is tiled with turquoise-tinted tiles whose colour is picked up and reflected by the large central pool. This intimate space is enclosed by carved wood screens.

From the Sahrij we descend to the river and cross to the Qarawiyyin quarter of the city to see the street of the dyers and the tanneries. Every morning, when the tanneries are at their most active, cascades of water pour through holes that were once the windows of houses. Here, hundreds of skins lie spread out on the rooftops to dry, while amid the vats of dye and pigeon dung tanners treat the hides. The rotation of colours in the honeycombed vats follows a traditional sequence – yellow (supposedly ‘saffron’, in fact turmeric), red (poppy), blue (indigo), green (mint) and black (antimony) – although vegetable dyes have largely been replaced by chemicals, to the detriment of workers’ health. This ‘innovation’ and the occasional rinsing machine aside, there can have been little change here since the sixteenth century, when Fes replaced Córdoba as the pre-eminent city of leather production.

During the day we break for lunch at Le Jardin des Biehn, a large Andalusian garden in the middle of the medina, scented by Isfahan roses, jasmine, orange blossom and bergamot. The gardens, surrounded by a former 20th-century summer palace, were redeveloped by Michel Biehn. Its quadrants are divided by mosaic paths, with tingling streams and fountains, and include flowers, aromatic herbs, fruits and vegetables.

Dinner tonight will be at La Maison Bleue restaurant, a traditional Moroccan residence built in 1915 by Sidi Mohammed El Abbadi, a judge and astronomer. (Overnight Fes) BLD

 

Day 8: Tuesday 26 March, Fes

Palace and Andalusian Gardens of Fes, including the Jnane Sbil Garden (Bou Jeloud Garden) & Museum Dar Batha
Lunch at Restaurant NUR
Bu ‘Inaniyya Madrasa
Qarawiyyin Mosque (exterior)
Shrine of Mawlay Idris II (exterior)
‘Attarin Madrasa
Fondouk el-Nejjarine
Fes was one of the first cities in the world to build a water distribution network which enabled it to develop the art of gardening. This morning we return to Fes’ medina for a walking tour which explores the city’s palaces and Andalusian gardens.

The 19th-century Jnane Sbil Park (formerly Bou Jeloud Gardens), covering an area of 7.5 hectares, underwent 4 years of extensive renovations and was reopened in 2012. Renovations works included the rehabilitation of its old and ingenious hydraulic systems (including fountains, seguias, channels and norias), restoration of the central boulevard and bamboo garden, as well as the creation of the Garden of Scents. The Oued Fes (Fes river) and the Oued Jawahir (river of pearls) flowed through the garden; a water wheel remains as a reminder of how the medieval city provided power to its craftsmen and their workshops.

From Jnane Sbil Gardens we proceed through the vividly decorated Bab Bou Jeloud Gate to Fes al-Bali, unique in its maintenance of an urban plan dating to the ninth century. The narrowness of its steep, winding streets means that motor vehicles may not enter and donkeys, mules and handcarts still transport food and merchandise around the city. Many of the religious, domestic and commercial structures lining the streets date to the fourteenth century, providing a unique insight into the physical experience of living in a medieval city.

In Fes al-Bali we begin with a visit to the Dar Batha Museum, a collection of antique Moroccan woodwork, marblework and other craftwork housed in a converted ‘Alawi palace. This museum contains the original carved wood doors of some of Fes’ madrasas and a marble doorway from the Sa’di palace in Marrakesh, along with many other artefacts which demonstrate Moroccan adaptation of Hispano-Muslim styles. The palace’s garden shaded with citrus trees and perfumed with orange blossom, red roses and sweet-scented jasmine, provided a serene escape from the bustling medina. Its layout is based on the principles of charbagh – a Persian-style garden where the quadrilateral layout is divided by walkways or flowing water that intersect at the garden’s centre. In Persian, char means ‘four’ and bagh means ‘garden’. This highly structured geometrical scheme, became a powerful metaphor for the organisation and domestication of the landscape, itself a symbol of political territory. The gardens were restored by landscape architect, Carey Duncan in 2005. Duncan worked with Cotecno and Architect Raffael Gorjux from Italy recreating the Andalusian Garden while keeping existing large trees, but replanting the undergrowth which was either bare or overtaken by weeds, and revitalising the existing planting.

Midday we dine at Restaurant NUR which operates as a venue for an intriguing new visiting-chef-in-residence project. Each visiting chef is invited to create a daily menu based on seasonal produce sourced from Fes’s central market or nearby farms. The restaurant is owned by Stephen di Renza, a former fashion director for Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, who divides his time between Fes and Marrakesh where he is the creative director for the Jardin Majorelle.

Following lunch we visit the 14th-century Bu ‘Inaniyya Madrasa and the ‘Attarin Madrasa, built around 1325. The ‘Attarin is a relatively small and intimate madrasa decorated with rich tile work. Both madrasas served as residences for students at the great mosques of Fes rather than as teaching centres.

We also visit the Qarawiyyin Mosque and the shrine of Mawlay Idris II. The two buildings form the sacred core of the city, and the prestigious markets for perfumes, spices and silk garments are located nearby adding pungency and fragrance to the air. Although non-Muslims may not enter these buildings, we can view their interiors through their gateways.

Finally we visit the Fondouk el-Nejjarine, home to the Museum of Wooden Arts and Crafts which showcases the skill of woodcarvers and artists both in the embellishments of the building and the intricately decorated items on display. Various types of timber are used in Moroccan woodcarving, including oak, mahogany, acacia and cedar, with the latter being one of the most popular, most likely due to its availability in Morocco, particularly in the Middle Atlas regions, but also because of its durability, warm shades of color and its texture which is particularly suited to carving. Declared a national monument in 1916, the funduq was originally built in the 18th century as a caravanserai (roadside inn) where travellers could rest before continuing their, sometimes arduous, journey. These buildings, which are found throughout Morocco, were typically built in a square or rectangular shape around an inner courtyard, usually with a fountain in the middle creating an oasis from the Moroccan heat. (Overnight Fes) BL

 

Merzouga – 1 night

 

Day 9: Wednesday 27 March, Fes – Ifrane – Midelt – Merzouga

Ifrane
Midelt
Today we travel from Fes to Merzouga, on the edge of the Sahara, through the Middle Atlas mountains. We shall pass through Ifrane, a small mountain town built by the French to escape the summer heat of the plains. The town is famous for its luscious gardens. Just outside Ifrane we drive through huge cedar forests, second only to those of Lebanon. These forests provided the wood to be carved into the magnificent decoration of Moroccan monuments. From Ifrane we will drive to Midelt through some of Morocco’s most magnificent scenery in which broad high plains are framed everywhere by snow-capped mountains.

Midelt, where we eat lunch, marks the start of one of the main routes through the eastern High Atlas mountains to the Sahara. This route was carved through the mountains by the Wad Ziz, a river which snakes south alongside the road. As we drive south the cedars and oaks of the north gradually give way to barren rock, clusters of date palms marking water sources, and finally the sand of the desert. We emerge from the mountains into the fertile Ziz Valley down which vast numbers of date palms stretch to the horizon like brilliant green rivers; dates are a Moroccan staple and one of the country’s major exports, (Overnight Merzouga) BLD

 

Tineghir – 1 night

 

Day 10: Thursday 28 March, Merzouga – Rissani – Erfoud – Tineghir

Dawn Camel Excursion (Optional)
Tomb of Mawlay ‘Ali al-Sharif, Rissani
Rissani Market
Moroccan khettara
After an optional dawn excursion to the sand dunes of Merzouga to watch the sunrise, we depart for Rissani, the capital of the province of Tafilalt and ancestral home of the ‘Alawi dynasty. Rissani lies alongside the ruins of the early Islamic town of Sijilmassa which controlled Moroccan trade with sub-Saharan Africa from the early 8th century until the 14th century. Sijilmassa’s vast ruins reflect the wealth of this medieval city, but by the 16th century it was no more than one of a number of fortified mud-brick villages (qsars). These mud-brick villages are composed of many small houses wedged together whose outer walls form a continuous outer rampart through which a single ornate portal provides access to the village. The modern town of Rissani, constructed this century, itself grew out of the largest set of local qsars.

The ‘Alawi dynasty’s founder Mawlay ‘Ali al-Sharif died a hero fighting the Portuguese in North Morocco. His tomb in Tafilalt became a local shrine, set amid date palms, irrigation canals and brilliant green qsar gardens. We shall visit the mausoleum of Mawlay ‘Ali al-Sharif (gardens only) and the Ksar Oulad Abdelhalim, a restored 18th-century kasbah or fortified house. In Rissani’s Thursday market, we may view wandering traders, nomads, Berbers and Arab desert dwellers who come to sell all kinds of clothing, wares, plants, spices and vegetables, and animals.

After lunch in Erfoud, we take the Tinjdad road west to the town of Tineghir at the mouth of the Tudgha Gorge. This road marks the start of the Route of the Qasbas, so-called because of the many fortified houses, or qasbas, which line its edges. Along the way we stop to view part of the 300-kilometre network of khettara (qanat) – subsurface irrigation channels which were excavated in the Tafilalt basin beginning in the late 14th century. More than 75 of these chains provided perennial water following the breakup of the ancient city of Sijilmassa. Khettara continued to function for much of the northern oasis until the early 1970s, when new technologies and government policies forced changes. (Overnight Tineghir) BLD

 

Ouarzazate – 1 night

 

Day 11: Friday 29 March, Tineghir – Tudgha Gorge – Taourirt – Ouarzazate

Qsars of Tineghir
Tudgha Gorge
Qasba de Taourirt
Near Tineghir the High Atlas meets the Jabal Saghru, a small massif which is part of the Anti Atlas range. The deep gorges of Tudgha and Dades mark the fault line between these two mountain ranges. Both gorges were carved out of the rock by torrents of melt water from the peaks above them. As they widen, small terraces of crops line each watercourse and villages cling to their sides, placed above the line of the torrential meltwaters which can close the gorges in spring. Here the mud-brick is the same brilliant red as the soil, creating a striking contrast to the rich green crops.

This morning we visit the qsar (fortified village) of Tineghir and then head up the Tudgha Gorge. En route we shall take a leisurely walk through one of the rich, cultivated areas nestling on the banks of the Wad Tudgha. After lunching in the Tudgha Gorge, we shall return to the Route of the Qasbas and continue west.

This afternoon we visit the Qasba of Taourirt located in the town of Ouarzazate. Built late in the 19th century, the qasba became important in the 1930s when the local Glawi dynasty’s powers were at their peak. The qasba was never actually resided in by the Glawi chiefs but rather by their second tier of command, including their sons and cousins and their massive entourages of extended family members, servants, builders, and craftsmen. The qasba has close to 300 rooms grouped in more than 20 riads (apartments). (Overnight Ouarzazate) BLD

 

Marrakesh – 5 nights

 

Day 12: Saturday 30 March, Ouarzazate – Ait Ben Haddu – Marrakesh

Ksar of Ait Ben Haddu
Tiz n’Tishka Pass
This morning we drive to Ait Ben Haddu, one of the fortified villages under control of the Glawi family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Located in the foothills of the High Atlas, Ait Ben Haddu is the most famous qsar in the Ounila Valley, and a striking example of southern Moroccan architecture. This fortified village in its dramatic landscape is regularly used as settings for films.

This afternoon we cross the High Atlas by way of the Tiz n’Tishka Pass to Marrakesh, leaving behind the landscapes of the pre-Sahara with its pisé qasbas and qsars, the verdant palm groves of the Ziz valleys, and the rocky drama of the gorges. (Overnight Marrakesh) BLD

Introduction to Marrakesh
Marrakesh is the 3rd imperial city we visit, founded in 1070 by the Almoravid Abu Bakr. He chose the site because it was well watered and flat: perfect as a camping ground for the Almoravid army, composed of nomads from the Sahara. Marrakesh began as the perfect springboard for the Almoravid conquest of North Morocco, but it soon became the Almoravid capital by virtue of its location on the trans-Saharan trade route.

After the Almoravids had conquered much of Spain, a period of cultural and artistic exchange ensued bringing the sophisticated urban culture of al-Andalus (Iberia) to Marrakesh. All that remains of Almoravid Marrakesh is an exquisite qubba, (domed chamber), which may indicate the site of the lost Almoravid great mosque of Marrakesh.

In 1147 Marrakesh fell to the Almohads, who then captured North Morocco, Muslim Spain, and North Africa as far as Tunis. The most famous Almohad ruler, Ya’qub al-Mansur, builder of the Qasba of the Udaya and Hassan Tower in Rabat and the Giralda of Seville, constructed a spectacular Almohad great mosque (1190), sister to the great mosques of Rabat and Seville here. The mosque soon became known as the Kutubiyya, or Booksellers’ Mosque, as a result of the book market which grew up in its shadow.

The minaret of the Kutubiyya is one of the most important extant Almohad buildings as the only Almohad minaret which has survived intact. Like the Hassan Tower, the minaret’s façades are decorated with intricate screenwork, punctuated on the upper levels with small windows. It is crowned with a small domed pavilion surmounted with a gold spike holding three gold balls and a crescent, and gives an impression of how the Hassan Tower would have looked. Ya’qub al-Mansur also enclosed the city in a new set of walls punctuated by gateways, of which the most important is the Bab Agnaou. The Almohads also constructed the suburban Menara Gardens with their huge central pool and olive groves as a place for recreation and physical training of the Almohad army.

The Marinids showed little interest in Marrakesh but nevertheless commissioned the Bin Yusuf or Yusufiyya Madrasa here. Like Morocco’s other Marinid madrasas, the Yusufiyya has a central courtyard leading to a prayer hall flanked by students’ cells.

The Sa’di dynasty added palaces, shrines and mosques to Marrakesh. The greatest Sa’di sultan, Ahmad al-Mansur al-Dhahabi, embellished the Sa’di tomb complex and renovated the Yusufiyya Madrasa. The Sa’di reproduced Andalusian stucco work in marble from Italy.

Fes, Meknes, Rabat and Marrakesh all became ‘Alawi capitals when this dynasty supplanted the Sa’adi. Many ‘Alawi sultans loved Marrakesh and built palaces and gardens here. Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman (1822-1859) restored the Agdal gardens and his son, Sidi Muhammad sponsored agricultural projects in the area. His grandson’s minister, Mawlay al-Hassan (1873-1894), built the Bahia and Dar Si Sa’id palaces.

 

Day 13: Sunday 31 March, Marrakesh

Bahia Palace & courtyard gardens
Sa’di Tombs
Bab Agnaou
Kutubiyya Mosque
Le Jardin Secret (See Youtube video)
La Mamounia: historical gardens and afternoon tea
This morning we visit the 19th-century Bahia Palace, a fine example of Andalusian-style architecture. This was previously the home of Grand Vizier Si Moussa in the 1860s and embellished from 1894 to 1900 by slave-turned-vizier Abu ‘Bou’ Ahmed. The name ‘Bahia’ means ‘palace of the beautiful.” There are 160 different rooms in the palace which sprawl out in an open, rambling fashion. Decorations take the form of subtle stucco panels, zellij decorations, tiled floors, smooth arches, carved cedar ceilings, shiny marble (tadlakt) finishes and zouak painted ceilings. It has three beautiful courtyard gardens, rich with intoxicating roses, jacaranda, jasmine, orange blossom and pomegranates.

We also see the Sa’di Tombs. Sultan Ahmed al Mansour constructed the Sa’di Tombs in Marrakech during his rule of Morocco (16th century) as a burial ground for himself and some 200 of his descendants. The most significant chamber in the tombs is the Hall of Twelve Columns. Here rests the Sultan Ahmed el Mansour and his entire family. This chamber has a vaulted roof, Italian marble columns, beautifully decorated cedar doors and carved wooden screens. Inside the inner mausoleum lies Mohammed esh Sheikh, founder of the Sa’di dynasty, as well as the tomb of his mother. The tombs are surrounded by a small garden with richly coloured and scented roses.

We end the morning visiting the 12th-century, horseshoe-arched Bab Agnaou and the Kutubiyya Mosque. The Almohad Bab Agnaou is one of the 19 gates of Marrakesh. The Kutubiyya Mosque, Marrakesh’s largest, is ornament with curved windows, a band of ceramic inlay, pointed merlons, and decorative arches. It was completed under the reign of the Almohad Caliph Yaqub al-Mansur (1184-1199).

Following lunch at the La Maison Arabe’s renowned restaurant ‘Les Trois Saveurs’, we visit Le Jardin Secret, a public garden designed by English landscape architect, Tom Stuart-Smith. The garden is located on the former site of the Riad of the Governor of the medina in the 19th century. Described by Tom Stuart-Smith: “Part of the garden is a faithful reconstruction of an Islamic garden that could have existed in Marrakech in the 19th century. The smaller garden has been largely reconfigured and is a more romantic interpretation of a Moroccan garden, full of the sorts of flowers and colour that would not be found in the more traditional garden. The west courtyard has a citrus grove with underplanting of Stipa tenuissima, California poppy, Lavender and Tulbaghia.”

We end the day with a visit to the gardens of La Mamounia one of the most famous hotels in the world (1929) and beloved of Winston Churchill. Its vast gardens are cared for by 40 gardeners who twice a year plant 60,000 annuals to enhance its grounds. They garden has immaculately mown grass under citrus and olive orchards, a desert garden, a rose garden and a tropical garden as well as many fountains. At the back of the 15-hectare garden there is a herb and kitchen garden whose produce is used in the hotel’s daily meals. We will be served Moroccan style afternoon tea in the garden. (Overnight Marrakesh) BL

Day 14: Monday 1 April, Marrakesh

Gardens of Jnane Tamsna with Gary Martin and Meryanne Loum-Martin
Yusufiyya Madrasa
Jama’ al-Fana’
This morning we transfer to Jnane Tamsna. Owned by ethnobotanist Gary Martin and his wife Meryanne Loum-Martin, this beautifully designed boutique guesthouse boasts a magnificent botany collection. It is set in the Palmeraie area of Marrakesh where tens of thousands of palm trees create shade for other plants to prosper, providing the atmosphere of an oasis. The free-flow approach (there are no formal lawns), adds to the ambience with grounds that encourage aromatic herb gardens, olive groves, lemon trees, vegetable plots and flower beds. The organic gardens are spread over nearly 9 hectares, and are watered constantly by traditional groundwater flow (khettara) and drip irrigation, while the air is naturally scented by gardenia, jasmine and white bougainvillea. We enjoy a visit of the garden and the estate before sitting for lunch.

In the afternoon we visit the religious heart of old Marrakesh where the Almoravid Qubba, the Yusufiyya Madrasa and Yusufiyya Mosque stand, probably on the site of the original Almoravid great mosque of Marrakesh. We shall also walk through the old medina visiting the city’s fascinating souqs. Marrakesh’s souqs are renowned for their vast size and the quality and variety of crafted goods on sale there. As in other Moroccan cities, each different craft can be found in its own particular street or alley: we shall see streets dedicated to gold jewellery, silver, cedar wood carving, silk robes, textiles, leather slippers, copper utensils, ceramics, rugs and carpets. The market area is covered by reed lattices whose dappled shade shelters the alleys from the hot southern sun.

We walk through the old city to its commercial and recreational heart, the Jama’ al-Fana’, an extraordinary public arena lined with booths selling fresh orange and grapefruit juice, nuts and sweets. In the centre a number of stalls offer snacks and meals of infinite variety, and numerous people provide public services and entertainments. Dentists, preachers, acrobats, black musicians from the Gnawa religious brotherhood, letter writers, snake charmers and story tellers all mingle in the Jama’ al-Fana’ from dusk late into the night. This square is very dear to the people of Marrakesh, a place to meet and promenade. This is evening is at leisure. You may wish to stay on in the Jama’ al-Fana’ to enjoy its extraordinary atmosphere. (Overnight Marrakesh) BL

 

Day 15: Tuesday 2 April, Marrakesh

Jardin Majorelle and Musée d’Art Berbère
Villa Oasis: the private garden of Pierre Bergé
Yves Saint Laurent Museum
Afternoon at leisure
Marrakesh, perhaps known best for its souqs (markets), squares and spices, also has many lush gardens. Green spaces have always been an integral part of life in Marrakesh. The city’s gardens have also inspired many artists, fashion designers and writers over the years. The British writer Osbert Sitwell said Marrakesh “is the ideal African city of water-lawns, cool, pillared palaces and orange groves.” Matisse, Delacroix, Yves Saint Laurent, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jean-Paul Getty visited too, finding inspiration and spending long periods in the city.

Early this morning we visit the Jardin Majorelle, created by the French painter Jacques Majorelle (1886-1962) and later owned by Yves Saint Laurent. The garden presents a cacophony of pink bougainvillea, blush-coloured water lilies, and a vast array of cacti. The inner walls are painted a vibrant ‘Majorelle’ blue, named after the garden’s founder. Majorelle’s art-deco studio houses a Berber Art Museum which displays valuable ceramics, weapons and magnificent jewellery, textiles, carpets, woodwork and other treasures. We also, by special invitation, will visit the gardens of Villa Oasis, Yves Saint Laurent’s private home adjoining the Jardin Majorelle.

Located right next to the Jardin Majorelle is the Yves Saint Laurent Museum dedicated to the work of the French fashion designer. This new museum houses an important selection from the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent’s impressive collection, which comprises 5,000 items of clothing, 15,000 haute couture accessories as well as tens of thousands of sketches and assorted objects.

The remain of the day is at leisure. (Overnight Marrakesh) B

Day 16: Wednesday 3 April, Marrakesh – Ourika Valley – Marrakesh

Private gardens of Dar Azaren, Tnine Ourika
Anima Garden
Beldi Country Club, lunch and garden
Today we drive thirty kilometres south of Marrakesh to visit the secluded retreat of Dar Azaren, owned by Liliane Fawcett. This dar (house), set in 6.5 hectares, is nestled within olive groves and walled gardens, and offers spectacular views of the High Atlas Mountains. The grounds and gardens, conceived by Arnaud Maurières and Éric Ossart, blend subtle plantations of fragrant flowers and sculptural cacti with local crops. The colours of the landscape using the grey santolina, mauve lantana and enormous Kalanchoe set a dramatic scene.

We then visit the nearby newly opened Anima, one of the most beautiful and imaginative gardens in Morocco. Austrian multi-media artist André Heller’s opulent, two-hectare botanical garden is a magical place of sensuality and wonder. It combines unusual sculptures with flowers and plants, paying homage to local traditions and fauna, as well as incorporating modern Western elements.

We return to Marrakesh to dine at the Beldi Country Club, set in a breathtaking landscape. After lunch, we visit the gardens, a fabulous combination of traditional Arabic plantings with long reflection pools, and French influences, with a field of roses and bold colours on furniture.

The remainder of the day is at leisure. (Overnight Marrakesh) BL

 

Taroudant – 5 nights

 

Day 17: Thursday 4 April, Marrakesh – Ouirgane -Taroudant

Lunch at Domaine de la Roseraie, Ouirgane
Dar Al Hossoun
Today we journey south to Taroudant, following one of the most spectacular routes in Morocco. It winds its way up and then down through the High Atlas, above the beautiful valleys and past isolated villages, eventually reaching the Tizi-n-Test pass, with its breathtaking views across the Souss Valley to the Anti Atlas.

We break for lunch in Ouirgane, a small village surrounded by stunning greenery, red-earth hills and pine forests. Lunch will be served in the Domaine de la Roseraie, which is set in the middle of 25 hectares of flower beds, olive trees, orchards and, as the name suggests, plenty of rose bushes. Winding paths through the estate offer unique views over the Toubkal range. (Mt Toubkkal is the highest peak in the Atlas mountains, and in North Africa, at 4137 metres).

We continue south along windy roads to Taroudant, known as the ‘pearl of the Souss Valley’. Here our group will stay at Dar Al Hossoun, designed by Arnaud Maurières and Éric Ossart.

For over 25 years, Maurières and Éric Ossart have been designing gardens in France and throughout the Mediterranean region. When they moved to southern Morocco they realised the importance of designing low-maintenance gardens for a dry climate. Since 2002, they have been working to create gardens in the olive groves to the west of Taroudant. Their work focuses on preserving areas of unspoiled natural wilderness, designing and building gardens and rammed-earth houses that have by stages added an entirely new neighbourhood to the city.

In the company of Ollivier Verra, owner of Dar Al Hossoun, we take a tour of Dar Al Hossoun before dinner.

Dar Al Hossoun was Ossart & Maurières’ very first build, one of the most widely publicised examples of their work as landscape architects. Surrounded by a garden that served originally as a test bed to study plant performance in the arid, pre-Saharan environment of the Souss Valley, the property boasts hundreds of species of plants proved to be drought-tolerant, plus an impressive 500-metre-square sunken garden for fragile species not usually found in this region. (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

 

Day 18: Friday 5 April, Taroudant

Dar Igdad and L’Orange Bleue
Tour of Taroudant’s secret gardens by horse & carriage
Palais Salam
Dar Ali
Dat Sidi Hussein
Dinner at Dar Sidi ou Sidi, the private home of Arnaud Maurières and Eric Ossart
Today we continue our discovery of Ossart & Maurières’ finest gardens in the Hossoun olive grove.

The Dar Al Hossoun build prompted the construction of the two adjoining properties, Dar Igdad and L’Orange Bleue, which marked Ossart & Maurières’ very first venture into steppe planning: with groups of grasses, drought-tolerant shrubs (grown mainly from seeds collected in Madagascar and Mexico) and succulents featuring a rich collection of opuntia (prickly pear).

Dar Igdad, meaning ‘the house of the birds’ in Berber, was begun in 2007 on the site of a former olive grove. Like Dar Al Hossoun, it is surrounded by high earthen walls in a rich mahogany colour, against which still stand many of the grove’s original multi-trunked trees. The garden, which featured in Garden Illustrated by Louisa Jones, is drought tolerant. The most spectacular part, a vast meadow, appears natural but is actually composed of species from similar biotopes from all over the world, like American agaves and African euphorbias that grow among the meadow’s Sahara grasses.

At Dar Deboules and Dar Carlhian, we see Ossart & Maurières’ most recent designs. Both gardens offer an unusually broad range of steppe plants, making it possible to track growth from planting to maturity.

Following a buffet lunch in the sunken garden of Dar Al Hossoun, we take a tour of Taroudant’s secret gardens by horse and carriage.

Taroudant, a walled Berber market town, lies just south of the High Atlas and to the north of the Anti Atlas. It gained commercial and political importance thanks to its position at the heart of the fertile Souss Valley. The Sa’adi made it their capital for a short time in the 16th century before moving on to Marrakesh. The 7.5 kilometres of ramparts surrounding Taroudant are among the best-preserved pise (reinforced mud) walls in Morocco. As the sun moves across the sky their colour changes from golden brown to the deepest red.

Built in the 16th and 17th century, a string of mighty defensive towers create the gates of the city. One of the most commonly used of these gates is the impressive, triple-arched Bab el-Kasbah, approached along an avenue of orange trees. Beyond and to the right past an olive press stands another gate, Bab Sedra that leads to the old qasba quarter – a fortress built by Moulay Ismail in the 17th century that is now the poorest part of town.

At the heart of this ancient city lies the medina, home to traditional Moroccan houses with interior gardens or courtyards, many of them built or restored by Ossart and Maurières. These are the riads for which Morocco is famous – havens of freshness usually exclusively reserved for their owners, and now ours to discover on this enchanting tour.

We enjoy some tea at Palais Salam, the former Pasha’s residence, before visiting Sidi Hussein, the house of five courtyards. This is one of Ossart and Maurières’ most ambitious projects in the medina. It is composed of several buildings, each one arranged around an amazing inner garden but all built in different styles to reflect the changing face of Taroudant architecture. The site was formerly occupied by badly dilapidated houses that were demolished to free up some 1000 square metres of building space.

We enjoy some tea at Palais Salam, the former Pasha’s residence, before visiting Dar Ali, Empress Farah’s house. Then, we visit Sidi Hussein, the house of five courtyards. This is one of Ossart and Maurières’ most ambitious projects in the medina. It is composed of several buildings, each one arranged around an amazing inner garden but all built in different styles to reflect the changing face of Taroudant architecture. The site was formerly occupied by badly dilapidated houses that were demolished to free up some 1000 square metres of building space.

Dinner will be served in the Dar Sidi ou Sidi, the private home of Arnaud Maurières and Eric Ossart, tucked away deep in the souq, at the heart of the old town. The house, a fine example of Taroudant vernacular architecture, features a terrace-planted botanic garden housing Ossart and Maurières’ private plant collection.

Dinner is followed by a screening (with commentary) of Frédéric Wilner’s film Jardins d’Eden (Gardens of Eden). (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

 

Day 19: Saturday 6 April, Taroudant – Tiout Oasis – Taroudant

Tiout Oasis and the Anti Atlas
Dar El Nour
Dar Ahbab
In the company of Ollivier Verra, we subdivide into two groups to take two small coaches on a scenic drive through the Souss Valley to the fertile oasis of Tiout, located on the northern edge of the Anti Atlas mountains.

In the Souss Valley we’ll witness the tremendous contrast between commercially farmed irrigated cash crops (such as oranges, maize or bananas) and subsistence farming of arid land including the strange sight of goats grazing in the native argania (trees). Argania spinosa, endemic to the semi-desert Sous Valley and the Algerian region of Tindouf, is a source of argan oil used for dipping bread, on couscous, salads, and in natural cosmetics. In Morocco, arganeraie forests now cover some 8280 square kilometres, designated as a UNESCO biosphere reserve.

The Tiout Oasis, formed by a now dried-up ancient lake, is probably the westernmost of all the oases that have survived from antiquity. It provides a perfect demonstration of the traditional custom of sharing irrigation water and also reflects the diverse richness of sub-Saharan arable farming. Our excursion includes a guided tour led by a local farmer, a visit to women argan oil cooperative, with lunch under Berber canvas at the heart of the oasis.

We return to the Hossoun valley to visit Dar El Nour and Dar Ahbab. These two houses and gardens were specifically designed for a relatively small plot of land, focusing on the affinity between rammed-earth buildings and natural swimming pools. The gardens appear wild, but do in fact contain at least 200 different species of carefully selected plants.

Tonight we dine together at Dar Al Hossoun. This will be followed by a screening of Jacques Becker’s Ali Baba et les 40 voleurs (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) – a 1954 film shot in Taroudant, starring French actor and singer Fernandel. (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

 

Day 20: Sunday 7 April, Taroudant

Les Jardins de Andrew
Dar Zahia, lunch and garden
Visit to the souq and ramparts
La Tour des Faucon, dinner and garden
This morning we visit three gardens located in the outskirt of Taroudant. We start the day with a visit to Les Jardins de Andrew. Andrew is an eccentric British collector with a taste for whimsical constructions. Andrew’s garden, located outside the ramparts, is punctuated by fanciful creations that lend an air of mystery to their lush surroundings. Ossart and Maurières describe their work thus: “using the same plants as at Dar Igdad, we laid out here a very formal garden corresponding exactly to the architecture of the house. Keeping in mind the advice of the great Brazilian designer Roberto Burle Marx, we used the right plant in the right place, whether rare or commonplace, native or exotic. We often use bold swaths of the same plant to get different moods even in this relatively small garden”.

Nearby, we visit the recently designed Dar Zahia Garden with the owner Marc Belli. French photographer Marc Belli designed his own garden covering nearly 4,000sq m. Behind the property main gate, one discover a field of roses and hibiscus. Around a patio, we find jacarandas, euphorbias, palm trees and acanthus. A 32-meter long swimming pool has been built in the middle of the plot. It has on one side an orchard and rose garden and on the other side, fields of olives and fig trees. All around the garden, cacti, agaves, grasses and zoysia lawn have been arranged with the pool water used to irrigate the soil. We enjoy lunch in Dar Zahia’s garden.

Today, Taroudant is an important hub in southern Morocco well known for its handicrafts, jewellery design, Berber crafts and woodwork. Within the walled inner city there are two main squares – Place Assarag (Place Alaouyine) and Place Talmoklate (Place en Nasr) – which mark the centre of town, with the main souq area between them. The pedestrian area of Place Assarag is the centre of activity, and comes alive in late afternoon as the sun’s heat eases off and people come out to promenade. Lately it has seen the return of performers such as storytellers, snake charmers and musicians – as in Marrakesh’s Jemaa el-Fnaa, but on a smaller scale.

Then we head for La Tour des Faucons (The Falcon’s Villa). Welcomed by Karl Morsher, the owner and designer, we visit his contemporary style villa and tower, as well as the renovated farmhouse and its extensive grounds of palm and olive trees (producing their own organic olive oil) and exotic flower-filled gardens. We enjoy our dinner at La Tour des Faucons.

We return to our riad, Dar Al Hossoun, for a screening of the film La Route des cédrats (‘The Citron Trail’) directed by Izza Genini (with commentary). (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

 

Day 21: Monday 8 April, Taroudant – Afensou and the upper valley of the Oued Ouaer – Taroudant

Claudio Bravo palace and gardens
Lunch in traditional Berber house
Trek across high plateaux to study flora found at medium altitude around Imoulass
High-altitude garden designed by Éric Ossart and Arnaud Maurières, Afra
Farewell Dinner at Dar Al Hossoun
Today, we spend the morning visiting the Claudio Bravo palace and gardens. Chilean painter Claudio Bravo spent his last years building an enormous palace in Taroudant in which to house his collections. The gardens surrounding the palace are equally enormous and are arranged around a large pond that provides water for citrus and banana trees; the interior gardens were designed by Ossart and Maurières.

Taroudant stands at the foot of the Western High Atlas Mountains, which reach a maximum elevation at Djebel Aoulim of 3400 metres. In the upper valleys are ancient mud brick and pisé villages nestling in high-altitude oases – traditional settlements planted with palm trees, olive groves and even walnut trees in the highest villages. The tracts of land in between them provide an ideal habitat for a wealth of native flora.

Following a light lunch in a traditional Berber house, we trek across the high plateau (nothing too demanding) through thickets of thuja (a tree of the coniferous family, close to cedar, which grows only in Morocco, specifically in the Atlas Mountains, used by artisans for making tables, boxes etc) and the flora found at medium altitude around Imoulass (Callitris articulate, Polygala balansae, Thymus saturejoïdes, Salvia taraxifolia, Chamacytisus albidus, etc).

In the village of Afra we visit Ossart & Maurières’ high-altitude garden – the perfect location for hundreds of different plant species, including some rare specimens.

We return to our riad for a farewell meal at Dar Al Hossoun. (Overnight Taroudant) BLD

Day 22: Tuesday 9 April, Taroudant – Agadir, Tour Ends.

Airport transfer for those taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight
This morning we shall transfer to Agadir airport in order to board our domestic flight to Casablanca. Group members taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer to the airport for the flight home. Those not taking this flight can use a taxi or contact ASA to arrange a private transfer. B

Cherry Blossom and the Art of the Japanese Garden

Cherry Blossom and the Art of the Japanese Garden

 

**FILLING FAST – BOOK NOW**

Highlights

 

Travel with John Patrick, landscape architect, author and former presenter on ABC TV’s Gardening Australia when Japan’s countryside explodes into symphonies of glorious cherry blossom.
Visit a diverse range of Japan’s traditional gardens, including Kinkaku-ji (the Golden Pavilion) & Ryoan-ji (Dragon Peace Temple) in Kyoto, Isuien Garden in Nara and Kenrokuen Garden in Kanazawa. We also visit a number of small gardens by special appointment.
Explore some of Japan’s splendid art collections, including Tokyo’s Suntory Museum of Art and the National Museum, the National Treasure Museum in Nara, and the magnificent collection of kimonos at Itchiku Kubota Art Museum at the foot of Mt Fuji.
Visit the Jiyu Gakuen School in Tokyo, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright when he lived in Japan.
Experience Japan’s unique culture at a tea ceremony at Kodai-ji Temple in Kyoto and lunch at the delightful teahouse of Happoen Garden in Tokyo.
View the great Buddha at Nara’s impressive Todai-ji Temple, the world’s largest timber building.
Explore the historic Kiso Valley, witnessing the distinctive wooden architecture of the Edo era.
Stay one night in Nara in a Ryokan – a traditional Japanese inn (or at the heritage Nara Hotel offering western-style accommodation).
Sample an array of traditional cuisine types, including shabu-shabu, teppan-yaki, oskashi and kaiseki.
Kazumasa Kubo, an internationally renown master of ikebana and artistic flower arranging, will give a special private demonstration of his work in Tokyo

 

Overview

 

The tour has been timed to visit Japan when its countryside explodes into symphonies of glorious cherry blossom. In historic centres like Kyoto and Nara and in Tokyo you’ll discover how Japan’s gardens can be experienced on many levels and are renowned for subtly combining artifice and nature, blurring the boundaries between garden and landscape. Some gardens are tiny and minimalist, conveying subtle meanings through ingenious combinations of moss, stones, rock and water. Others are grand, framing rich palaces and temples like Tokyo’s Imperial Palace Garden. In Kyoto we combine garden visits with expressions of traditional Japanese culture like tea ceremonies, geisha rituals and cuisine. Kyoto gardens include such extensive, ancient temple and garden complexes as Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion), Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) and Ryoan-ji – the famed Dragon Peace Temple. Throughout, garden visits are also combined with an appreciation of Japan’s traditional architecture and great museums to enrich your understanding of Japanese aesthetics. In 8th-century capital Nara, architectural treasures, great collections and fine gardens include the Todai-ji Temple, the world’s largest timber building, Kofuku-ji Temple with a five-storey pagoda and treasure trove of Buddhist statues; we also visit Nara National Museum. At Kanazawa we explore traditional construction techniques at Kanazawa Castle, Nagamachi Samurai Residence and Higashichaya District’s many old Samurai houses. Kanazawa’s Kenrokuen Garden is the ‘garden of the six sublimities’. In Tokyo highlights include Happoen Garden where ladies in kimonos serve lunch in a delightful teahouse before we stroll through the gardens viewing 200 year-old bonsai trees. Rikugien Garden (c. 1700) is utterly Japanese, with manicured grass, artfully contorted pine trees held up by wooden supports, wooden tea houses, crooked rustic bridges over gurgling streams and a lake filled with carp and tiny turtles. Tokyo National Museum and Suntory Museum of Art offer masterpieces to further inspire you. We also make a very special day tour to villages in Kiso Valley, carefully preserved monuments to Japan’s feudal past, and stroll Japan’s greatest natural symbol, Mt Fuji.

 

15-Day Cultural Garden Tour of Japan

 

Overnight Tokyo (1 night) • Kawaguchiko (1 night) • Matsumoto (2 nights) • Kanazawa (1 night) • Kyoto (3 nights) • Nara (1 night) • Kyoto (2 nights) • Tokyo (3 nights)

 

Tokyo – 1 night

 

Day 1: Wednesday 27 March, Arrive Tokyo
Arrival transfer for those travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight
Welcome Evening Meal
After our arrival at Narita Airport those taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight transfer by private to the Hotel New Otani Tokyo. This hotel stands within a beautiful traditional Japanese garden originally designed for the daimyo (feudal lord) Kato Kiyomasa Lord of Kumamoto in Kyustiu over four hundred years ago. This garden is well worth strolling through and will introduce you to many facets of the Japanese gardens we shall visit in the coming weeks. Tonight we enjoy a welcome evening meal at our hotel. (Overnight Tokyo) D

 

Kawaguchiko – 1 night

 

Day 2: Thursday 28 March, Tokyo – Kawaguchiko

Sankei-en Garden
Itchiku Kubota Art Museum
Today we depart Tokyo by coach and travel west to the iconic Mt Fuji, the largest volcano in Japan. This is Japan’s highest peak at 3776m. It last erupted in 1707 and forms a near perfect cone. Mount Fuji is arguably Japan’s most important landmark, which stands for the nation’s identity. It has been pictured countless times, not least in Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1826 – 1833).

On the way to Mount Fuji we visit the beautiful Sankei-en Garden, a spacious Japanese style garden in southern Yokohama, in which are set a number of historic buildings from across Japan. There is a pond, small rivers, a profusion of flowers and wonderful scrolling trails. The garden, built by Hara Sankei, was opened to the public in 1904. Among the historic buildings in the park are the elegant residence of a daimyo (feudal lord), several tea houses, and the main hall and three storied pagoda of Kyoto’s old Tomyoji Temple.

In Kawaguchiko we will visit the Itchiku Kubota Art Museum. When the artist Itchiku Kubota was young, he encountered an example of ‘Tsujigahana’ at the Tokyo National Museum. ‘Tsujigahana’ was a technique used in dying kimonos during the 15th and 16th century, an art that was later lost. Kubota-san revived the art and created a series of kimonos decorated with mountain landscapes in all four seasons and Mount Fuji. These kimonos are displayed in a breathtaking setting. The main building is a pyramid-shaped structure supported by 16 Hiba (cypress) wooden beams more than 1,000 years old. Other parts of the museum, displaying an antique glass bead collection, are constructed of Ryukyu limestone. The museum’s unique architecture is set against a lovely garden and red pine forest. Tonight we dine together at the hotel. (Overnight Kawaguchiko) BD

Note: Our luggage will be transported separately to our hotel in Nagoya. An overnight bag will be needed for use in Kawaguchiko.

 

Matsumoto – 2 nights

 

Day 3: Friday 29 March, Kawaguchiko – Matsumoto

Fifth Station of Mt Fuji
Nakamachi Street and Kurassic-kan
Matsumoto Rising Castle
We start our day with a visit to the Fifth Station (Kawaguchi-ko) at the Fuji Five Lakes, and from here we can enjoy a spectacular view of the snow-capped peak (weather permitting). A gentle stroll will allow us to identify some of the native flora of this region of Japan.

We then travel to Matsumoto. On arrival in the town, we walk through the historic Nakamachi-dori, a street lined with white-walled traditional inns, restaurants and antique shops. Here we visit the Nakamachi Kurassic-kan, an historic sake brewery with black-beamed interiors and traditional plaster-work outside. We cross the river to walk along the market street Nawate-dori before arriving at Matsumoto-jo, the imposing castle approached across a moat. Matsumoto-jo was founded by the Ogasawara clan in 1504 but it was another lord, Ishikawa, who remodeled the fortress in 1593 and built the imposing black five-tier donjon that is now the oldest keep in Japan. From the top of the tower we enjoy spectacular views of the town and surrounding mountains. (Overnight Matsumoto) B

 

Day 4: Saturday 30 March, Matsumoto – Kiso Valley – Matsumoto

Tsumago
Magome
Nagiso Town Museum
Today we drive out of Matsumoto and head to the Kiso Valley for a taste of how Japan looked prior to urbanisation. Developed by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu as one of the five main highways linking his capital Edo (Tokyo) with the rest of Japan, the valley contains eleven post towns and some of them have been preserved as a virtual museum of the feudal past.

As we follow the valley we’ll enjoy features of the Nakasendo route, including Kiso Fukushima, the location of a major barrier, but today the gateway to the sacred mountain of Ontake.

Tsumago was a ghost town 30 years ago, with its traditional Edo-era houses on the point of collapse. Its restoration sparked the idea of cultural preservation in Japan. The pedestrian-only street is similar to that once encountered by lords and their samurai centuries ago. The highlight of Tsumago is Okuya Kyodokan, a folk museum inside a designated post inn, where the daimyo’s (feudal lord) retinue rested. On the opposite side of the street the Kyu-honjin is where the daimyo used to stay. We will also visit Magome, which means ‘horse-basket’, because this is where travellers were forced to leave their horses before tackling the mountainous roads ahead.

Our final visit for the day is to the Nagiso Town Museum. Opened in 1995, the Museum has three divisions: Tsumago Post Town Honjin, a sub-honjin, and a history museum. (A honjin is a temporary residence for a lord or dignitary to stay in when traveling to and from the shogunate capital of Edo.) The present building of the subhonjin was built in 1878 utilising Japanese cypress throughout, a type of wood proscribed for ordinary construction during the Edo period (1600 –1868). The History Museum contains historical materials of Nagiso Town and history of the trust organisation dedicated to the preservation of historic towns, villages, and neighborhoods. From here we return to Matsumoto, where you can explore the city on your own and enjoy dinner at a traditional restaurant. (Overnight Matsumoto) B

 

Kanazawa – 1 night

 

Day 5: Sunday 31 March, Matsumoto – Kanazawa

Ishikawa Prefectural Museum for Traditional Products and Crafts
Nomura Samurai Residence
Higashi-Chayamachi District
This morning we travel by coach to Nagano, where we board the new Shinkansen Superexpress train to Kanazawa. The Japanese visit Kanazawa in droves but perhaps because of its remote location and very cold winters few foreigners make the journey to experience its rich cultural legacies.

On arrival we visit the Prefectural Arts Museum & Craft Centre located at the edge of the gardens and designed to harmonise with its landscape. The museum was established to showcase the fine arts and crafts of Ishikawa, a Prefecture whose culture of fine arts and traditional crafts compares with that of Tokyo and Kyoto. Highlights of its collection include feudal daimyo utensils using the Kaga Makie technique and a huge range of Kutani porcelain collection from Ko-kutani (Old Kutani). The museum also exhibits works by numerous ‘living national treasures’ whose works relate in some way to Ishikawa Prefecture.

The feudal atmosphere of Kanazawa still lingers in the Nagamachi district where old houses of the Nagamachi Samurai line the streets that once belonged to Kaga Clan Samurais. The T-shaped and L-shaped alleys are distinct characteristics of the feudal town, and the mud doors and gates of the houses remain the same as they were 400 years ago. The houses with their samurai windows (bushimado) and mud walls under the yellow Kobaita wooden roofs, which were protected from snow by straw mats (komo), evoke a bygone era. We shall visit the Nomura Samurai Family Residence to develop fort a Samurai’s daily life was like during the feudal period. The garden inside the Nomura Residence has trees that are over 400 years old as well as various beautiful lanterns.

Across the Asano River is the district of Higashi-Chayamachi, Kanazawa’s most famous geisha district. Many of the tall wooden-latticed houses on the narrow streets are still used by geisha for high-class entertainment as they have done since 1820 when the area was established as a geisha quarter. You can take tea (without geisha) at Shima House for a chance to experience its refined and elegant atmosphere. Like Kyoto’s Gion, this district has been designated as one of Japan’s cultural assets. (Overnight Kanazawa) B

Note: Our luggage will be transported separately to our hotel in Kyoto. An overnight bag will be needed for use in Kanazawa.

 

Kyoto – 3 nights

 

Day 6: Monday 1 April, Kanazawa – Kyoto

Kanazawa Castle, Kanazawa
Kenrokuen Garden, Kanazawa
Gion District, Kyoto
Our first destination this morning is Kanazawa Castle, the seat of power of the local Maeda clan, hereditary feudal lords (daimyo) of the Kaga province from 1583. Burnt down on a number of occasions, only the superb Ishikawa Gate and the Sanjikken Nagaya samurai dwelling house survive from the original construction.

Kenrokuen Garden is Kanazawa’s prime attraction and one of the three most famous gardens in Japan, along with Korakuen (Okayama) and Kairakuen (Mito). Kenrokuen was once the outer garden of Kanazawa Castle and there has been a garden on the site since the late 1600s. The original garden, begun by the fifth Maeda lord, Tsunonori Maeda, was called Renchi tei but it was almost entirely burnt out in 1759. It was restored in the 1770s and in 1822 became known as Kenrokuen, a name that means, ‘the garden of six sublimities’ or, ‘a garden combining the six aspects of a perfect garden’. These six features were what the Chinese traditionally believed were necessary for the ideal garden – spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, water-courses and panoramas: all these characteristics are to be found in the 25 acres of this beautiful garden.

We then transfer to the train station to take the train south the Kyoto. Kyoto was the capital of Japan from the late 8th century (circa 794 AD) until 1868, when the court was moved to Tokyo. It is home to 17 World Heritage Sites, 1600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines, yet much of the city centre is modern. One of the finest of its contemporary buildings is its dramatic railway station.

We begin our exploration of Kyoto with a glimpse of a vanishing world – the district of Gion, home to geisha houses and traditional tea houses. Although the number of geishas has declined over the last century the area is still famous for the preservation of forms of traditional architecture and entertainment. To experience the traditional Gion, we stroll along Hanami-koji, a street lined by beautiful old buildings including tea houses where you may be able to glimpse a geisha apprentice. Contrary to popular belief Gion is not a red-light district, nor are geishas prostitutes. Geishas are young girls or women extensively trained as entertainers and skilled in a number of traditional Japanese arts such as classical music and dance as well as the performance of the exacting rituals of a Japanese tea ceremony. (Overnight Kyoto) B

 

Day 7: Tuesday 2 April, Kyoto

Kinkaku-ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion)
Daitoku-ji Buddhist Complex incl. the Ryogen-in
Ryoan-ji (Dragon Peace Temple)
Kyoto is notable for its extraordinary diversity of Japanese gardens, including many of the finest traditional temple gardens. Our first visit in Kyoto is to the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji). During the 15th century the Chinese Sung Dynasty exercised an enormous influence in Japan as artists, poets and Zen priests were gathered together by Yoshimitsu, the third Ashikaga shogun (1358-1409). Yoshimitsu began construction of the Golden Pavilion just before he retired in 1394, handing power to his nine-year-old son so that he could move to his estate. Little of his work remains but we can sense the character of the garden in its pond, rockwork and extensive plantings.

The pavilion at Kinkaku-ji recalls Sung period architecture but it is a recreation, having been burned down in the 1950s. The present building is an exact replica except that where Yoshimitsu proposed only to gild the ceiling of the third storey with gold; now the whole building is gilded. Yoshimitsu positioned his palace on the edge of a lake. The ground floor was a reception room for guests and departure point for leisure boating, the first storey was for philosophical discussions and panoramic views of the lake while the upper floor acted as a refuge for Yoshimitsu and was used for tea ceremonies. The size of the gardens is increased visually by the water’s convoluted edge, the use of rocks and clipped trees and by visually ‘borrowing’ a distant view of Mt Kinugasa that creates a sense of gradation between foreground, middleground and deep distance.

We next visit Daitoku-ji, a large complex of Zen temples with prayer halls, religious structures and 23 sub-temples with some of the most exquisite gardens in Kyoto, some quite small, including raked gravel gardens and, in the Daisen-in, one of the most celebrated small rock gardens in Japan. The Japanese consider Daitoku-ji one of the most privileged places to study and it is associated with many of Japan’s most famous priests. Unlike many of the larger public Buddhist temples of earlier sects, the Rinzai sect monasteries were intimate, inward looking and remained isolated from the outside world.

The temple received imperial patronage and thus grew out from its centre in an organic way. A transition occurred as the complex expanded from a formal centre to semiformal and informal precincts. The central north-south walkway is most formal with wide paths to accommodate processions and ceremonies, while to the side are sub-temples with gates. As you walk through one of these gates you immediately come upon a less formal world with narrow paths, turns and walkways. The temple site contains a number of notable gardens including Daisen-in, Korin-in, Koho-an, Hogo and Ryogen-in.

We conclude the day with a visit to Ryoan-ji – the Dragon Peace Temple. No other garden in the world is so simple, elegant and refined. The garden comprises 15 rocks in a sea of raked gravel surrounded by a compacted mud wall coated in oil that is in itself a national treasure. The garden dates from 1500 as part of a temple of the Renzai sect of Zen Buddhism. The temple burned but was reconstructed in its original form. The garden constitutes the supreme example of a dry garden where gravel and rock symbolise plant and water elements. Indeed, apart from the moss on the rocks, no other plants grow in it. The meaning of the garden remains unknown. It might symbolise islands in a sea, mountains seen through clouds or tigers and cubs crossing a river, but this doesn’t matter since this is a garden to encourage contemplation, the enclosing wall separating the visitor from the world outside, and the verandah creating a horizontal boundary. (Overnight Kyoto) B

 

Day 8: Wednesday 3 April, Kyoto

Renge-ji Temple
Shisen-do Temple
Lunch at the Grand Prince Hotel
Ginkaku-ji (Temple of the Silver Pavilion)
Today we will visit a number of Kyoto’s great gardens. Our first visit for the day is to Renge-ji, a diminutive garden that captures the essence of Japanese gardens with a central pond surrounded by plantings linking to the hillside beyond. Stones, bridge and plantings are all reflected on the water-surface, giving a sense of spaciousness.

Shisen-do is an intimate garden, of personal taste rather ostentatious public display. Its street walls mask the tranquillity and beauty to be found within. Raked sand, clipped azaleas and the tree covered hillsides of Higashiyama form the main components of this garden designed by Ishikawa Jozan (1583–1672). Clipped azaleas give way to natural vegetation beyond the garden boundary but it is the close harmony between the indoor spaces of the pavilion and the garden beyond that is most striking. The verandah offers a transition between its dark interior and the light-filled garden.

Following lunch at the Grand Prince Hotel we visit Ginkaku-ji. Originally constructed as the retirement villa of the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1435–1490), the Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion) became a Zen temple upon his death. The garden is complex, comprising two distinct sections, a pond area with a composition of rocks and plants, and a sand garden with a truncated cone – the Moon-Viewing Height – suggesting Mt Fuji, and a horizontal mound – the Sea of Silver Sand – named for its appearance by moonlight. An educational display at the garden contains good moss and weed moss to allow you to tell the difference. (Overnight Kyoto) BL

 

Nara – 1 night

 

Day 9: Thursday 4 April, Kyoto – Nara

Nara Park (Nara-koen) including the temples of Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji
Isuien Garden
Traditional Japanese bath (optional)
We leave Kyoto by coach for the ancient Japanese city of Nara, the national capital prior to Kyoto. During this period Buddhism became firmly established in Japan under the patronage of nobles who sponsored the buildings and works of art that we shall visit.

Our first destination is to the impressive Todai-ji, founded in 745 by Emperor Shomu. Although rebuilt following a fire in 1709 to two-thirds of its original size it neverheless remains the largest timber building in the world. Two seven-metre tall guardian gods flank the entrance, (known as the nandai-mon), to the great Buddha Hall, the Daibutsu-den, which houses the 15-metre tall bronze statue of the great Buddha. The original casting was completed in 752, when an Indian priest stood on a special platform and symbolically opened its eyes by painting on the Buddha’s eyes with a huge brush. This ceremony was performed before the then retired Emperor Shomu, his wife Komio and the reigning Empress Kogen, together with ambassadors from China, India and Persia. Your visit will be a truly amazing experience.

We then visit the wonderful Nara-koen complex. It contains a five-storey pagoda, part of the Kofuku-ji founded in 669, a fine collection of Buddhist statues in the kokuhokan (National Treasure Building) and a 15th-century hall to the north of the pagoda. The kokahokan is a treasure trove of early Buddhist statues and although it is not large, each piece has been carefully chosen as a masterpiece of its style and period.

Our final visit is to the small Isuien garden, a traditional Japanese garden notable for its extensive use of moss and its exquisite tea pavilion. From here you might like to stroll through some of Nara’s historic streets or try a traditional Japanese bath (sento: public bath; onsen: hot spring bath). The traditional Japanese-style inn we are staying in tonight provides open-air communal baths using hot spring water and affords a wonderful view of Kofuku-ji Temple’s five-storey pagoda, which is illuminated at night. Tonight we dine in a traditional style at the Ryokan Asukasou on Japanese kaiseki dishes. (Overnight Nara) BD

Note: We will leave our main luggage at the hotel in Kyoto during our 1 night stay in Nara. An overnight bag will be needed for use in Nara

 

Kyoto – 2 nights

 

Day 10: Friday 5 April, Nara – Kyoto

Treasures of the Nara National Museum
Shin-Yakushi-ji Temple
Horyu-ji Temple
Our first visit today is to the Nara National Museum noted for its collection of Buddhist art, including images, sculpture, and ceremonial articles.

Shin-Yakushi-ji Temple was built in the 19th year of the Tempyo era (747) by Empress Komyo as an offering of thanksgiving when Emperor Shomu recovered from an eye disease. It now constitutes a single hall enshrining a powerful image of Yakushi Nyorai, the Healing Buddha, surrounded by clay sculptures of 12 guardians called Juni Shinsho, the Yakushi Nyorai’s protective warriors. In Japanese sculpture and art, the warriors are almost always grouped in a protective circle around the Yakushi Nyorai; they are rarely depicted as single figures. Many say they represent the 12 vows of Yakushi; others believe the 12 were present when the historical Buddha introduced the ‘Healing Sutra’; others claim that they offer protection during the 12 daylight hours, or that they represent the 12 months and 12 cosmic directions, or the 12 animals of the 12-year Chinese zodiac.

The grounds of Horyu-ji Temple house the world’s oldest surviving wooden structures, dating from the Asuka Period (mid 6th – beginning of 8th c.AD). Throughout the 187,000-square-metre grounds are irreplaceable cultural treasures, bequeathed across the centuries and continuing to preserve the essence of eras spanning the entire journey through Japanese history since the 7th century. Horyu-ji contains over 2,300 important cultural and historical structures and articles, including nearly 190 that have been designated as National Treasures or important Cultural Properties. In 1993 Horyu-ji was selected by UNESCO as part of the World Heritage as a unique storehouse of world Buddhist culture. Following this visit we transfer by coach to Kyoto. (Overnight Kyoto) B

 

Day 11: Saturday 6 April, Kyoto

Tenryu-ji Temple
Saiho-ji (or ‘Koke-dera’ – moss temple)
Nanzen-ji (Hojo and Konchi-in)
Nishiki-koji Covered Market
We first visit the Tenryu-ji. It dates from the period of shogun Ashikaga Takauji (1339) who commissioned the priest Muso Kokushi, one of Japan’s best known garden designers who also designed the moss garden at Saiho-ji to create this garden. Kokushi’s work modified an estate of Emperor Gosaga from 1270. He changed its form to include an Heian-style pond garden with popular, contemporary Chinese aspects. These included most notably a group of seven vertical rocks near the rear shore of its pond. These contrast markedly with Japanese rock work that takes a more horizontal form. This is one of the earliest gardens to show shakkei, the incorporation of borrowed landscape into a garden’s design.

Saiho-ji Temple has the oldest major garden of the Muromachi Period. Originally designed to represent the Western Paradise (or Pure Land) of Amida Buddhism, this so-called ‘strolling garden’ is set in a dark forest and is designed for meditation. It was re-designed by a Zen Buddhist priest, Muso Soseki, who also designed the Tenryu-ji garden in Kyoto, when it passed to the Zen Buddhist sect. The chief feature of the garden is the ‘golden pond’ with pavilions scattered on its shore and connected by a path that allows controlled views of the garden. The pond is shaped like the Japanese character for ‘heart’ or ‘spirit’. It is divided by islands connected by bridges. The mosses, which give the garden its alternative name (Koke-dera – ‘moss temple’) were established as an economy measure after the Meiji restoration (1868).

Nanzen-ji is one of the most famous Rinzai Zen temples in Japan. It was founded in 1291 by Emperor Kameyama, and was rebuilt several times after devastating fires. At the entrance to the complex one passes through the huge Imperial gate, built in 1628 by Todo Takatora, and into the complex with its series of sub-temples. We will see the hojo, or abbot’s quarters, which is notable for both it’s beautiful golden screen paintings and the tranquil sand and rock garden. We will also explore the sub-temple Konchi-in which was added to the complex in 1605.

In the late afternoon we shall walk through the traditional 17th-century Nishiki-koji covered market, which has for centuries been the focus of food shopping in the city. You may wish to try Japanese pickled vegetables or purchase teapots and teabowls from a traditional vendor. By contrast we will visit a Japanese electrical store where you will see Japanese consumerism at its height. Spread over five storeys, this extraordinary store offers every imaginable electrical item. We will end the day in the fashionable gallery and restaurant area. (Overnight Kyoto) B

 

Tokyo – 3 nights

 

Day 12: Sunday 7 April, Kyoto – Tokyo

Heian Shrine
Tofuku-ji
Tea Ceremony at Kodai-ji Temple
We begin the day with a visit to one of the newest religious sites in Kyoto, the Heian Shrine, which boasts the largest torii (sacred gate) in Japan and lovely gardens. The shrine was built in 1896 to commemorate the city’s 1100th anniversary and to honour its founder, Emperor Kammu and also to celebrate the culture and architecture of the city’s Heian-past. It is constructed on the site of the original Heian Hall of State but is a smaller and somewhat imperfect recreation of this earlier building. Four gardens surround the main shrine buildings on the south, west, middle and east, covering an area of approximately 33,000 square metres. The gardens are designated as a national scenic spot representative of Meiji-era (1868–1912) garden design.

We then visit the superb Tofuku-ji Hojo, a garden designed in 1939 by Shigemori Mirei. This will be familiar to many who have read books on Japanese gardens for it combines 20th-century design with elements from Japanese tradition. Mirei implements subtle, restrained design themes such as chequer-boards of stone in moss to allow the natural form and colour of maples on the surrounding hills to make full impact.

We end our visit to Kyoto with a visit to the Kodai-ji Temple to experience a tea ceremony. We then transfer to the station and take the JR Super Express train to Tokyo. (Overnight Tokyo) B

 

Day 13: Monday 8 April, Tokyo

Jiyu Gakuen School
Suntory Museum of Art
Shabu Shabu Lunch at Kisoji Restaurant
Rikugien Garden
We begin our day with a visit to the Jiyu Gakuen School. This is a beautifully preserved building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1921, one of 12 buildings the American designed during the two years he lived in Japan. Only three of Wright’s buildings survived the 20th century, and we shall be taken on a tour of this very special building.

The Suntory Museum of Art was founded in Tokyo’s Marunouchi district in 1961 as the cultural arm of a famous distillery. ‘Beauty in Everyday Life’ has been the theme of the Museum since its establishment when the then President of Suntory, Keizo Saji, developed what is now a 3,000-piece collection containing one National Treasure and 12 Important Cultural Properties among its priceless ceramics, folding screens, kimonos, lacquer ware, textiles and glasswork. Its aim is to relate old things to the new, present beauty over time, and to represent beauty without regard for cultural frontiers of countries and races.

To enhance this philosophy of fusing the ‘traditional’ with the ‘contemporary’, the Museum relocated in 2007 to its current Tokyo Mid-town location to be part of the art district known as Roppongi art triangle. Architect Kengo Kuma, whose aim was to create ‘a Japanese-style room in the city’, designed its new home using new technology and traditional Japanese design elements. The architect’s signature vertical lattice design covers the exterior, while the interior features a sliding 10-metre-high lattice that controls the flow of light. Natural materials like laminated paulownia wood for the interior lattice, washi for the atrium walls, and recycled whiskey barrel wood (a connection to the Suntory distillery) for the flooring create a feeling of warmth throughout the building.

We take a break in the middle of the day to enjoy a lunch at the traditional Kisoji Restaurant whose specialty is shabu-shabu: thin slices of beef cooked in boiling water at your table and dipped in sauce.

Our last garden visit today is to the Rikugien garden which is all that a traditional Japanese garden should be: manicured grass, artfully contorted pine trees held up by wooden supports, wooden tea houses and moss-encrusted stone lanterns, crooked rustic bridges over gurgling streams, a lake filled with carp and tiny turtles. Built around 1700 by Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, grand chamberlain of the fifth shogun, Rikugien means ‘six poems garden’ and reproduces in miniature 88 scenes from famous poems. While some traditional Japanese gardens are meant to be contemplated from a fixed spot, Rikugien is a typical example of a so-called ‘strolling garden’ and we will meander through the network of walking paths as we enjoy the afternoon. (Overnight Tokyo) BL

 

Day 14: Tuesday 9 April, Tokyo

Tokyo National Museum
Happoen Garden
Demonstration by Kazumasa Kubo of the Japanese art of flower arranging
Farewell Lunch at Happoen Gardens Teahouse
Koishikawa-korakuen Garden
Ginza Shopping Area
Established in 1872, the Tokyo National Museum is the oldest and largest museum in Japan. The museum holds over 110,000 objects, which include more than 87 Japanese National Treasures and 610 Important Cultural Property holdings. The museum’s collections focus on ancient Japanese art and Asian art along the Silk Road but there is also a large collection of Greco-Buddhist art.

Meaning ‘beautiful from any angle’, the Happoen garden lives up to its name. On arrival we shall be given a demonstration in Japanese flower arranging by internationally renown master Kazumasa Kubo, who has studied the tradition of ikebana, and adapted it into his own style. Following a farewell lunch at the garden’s delightful tea house, where ladies in kimono will serve you matcha (green tea) and okashi (variety of snacks), a stroll through the gardens will reveal 200 year old bonsai trees, a stone lantern said to have been carved 800 years ago, and a central pond.

In the afternoon we visit a rare surviving 17th-century strolling garden, located in the west of the city. Koishikawa-korakuen was designed in part by Zhu Shun Shui, a Ming dynasty refugee from China, and the garden recreates both Japanese and Chinese landscapes. Here we will find waterfalls, ponds, stone lanterns, a small lake with gnarled pines and humped bridges.

We finish our day with a visit to Ginza. When Tokugawa Ieyasu moved his capital to Edo in 1590, Ginza was swampland. In 1612 the area was filled in and the silver mint was built here giving Ginza (‘Silver Place’) its current name. The area was completely destroyed by fire in 1872 after which the Meiji government ordered it rebuilt in red brick to the designs of English architect Thomas Waters. This new incarnation seems to have set its course for all things Western and modern, turning the area into one of Tokyo’s great shopping-centres. (Overnight Tokyo) BL

 

Day 15: Wednesday 10 April, Depart Tokyo

Imperial Palace Plaza
Ekouin Nenbutsudo Temple
Airport transfer for participants departing on the ASA ‘designated’ flight
Our last morning in Japan begins with a visit to the Japanese Imperial Palace Plaza, the home of the reigning emperor of Japan and his family. We will enter via the Nijubashi, where two picturesque bridges span the moat. The Higashi Gyoen, or East Garden, was opened to the public in 1968 and provides an attractive environment in which to stroll and relax.

During our travels we have encountered many traditional and historic temples and explored the variety of gardens that play such an important role in the complex. Our program concludes with a visit to the Ekouin Nenbutsudo Temple. This is a newly built modern temple in the lively heart of Tokyo. Here we will see the skill by which the architects have utilised the precious space available, and how the traditional components of a temple complex have been reinterpreted in a contemporary structure. In place of a small stroll garden using moss or stone or sand, here bamboo is used to create a green space for contemplation in this busy metropolis.

At the conclusion of the visit participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight will transfer by private coach to the Narita Airport for their flight home. B

From the Italian Alps to Puglia

From the Italian Alps to Puglia

 

From the Italian Alps to Puglia – Gardens of Northern and Southern Italy with Sandy Pratten
11–23 September 2018 (13 days)

Experience a kaleidoscope of Italian horticulture, from the verdant Alpine gardens of Lombardy and Piedmont in the north to the Mediterranean gardens of Puglia in the south.

Begin in the Lakes District where Italy meets the Alps, and the long glacial lakes of Maggiore and Como are studded with Renaissance villas and English-style gardens once the domain of counts and cardinals.

Then travel to Puglia on the heel of the Italian Peninsula and explore the Mediterranean-style gardens around Alberobello and Lecce. Stroll through groves of grapes, olives, figs and almonds, and visit botanical gardens featuring holm oaks, rare grasses and tropical plants.

 

AT A GLANCE…

 

• Explore the shores of Lake Maggiore and Lake Como in the Italian Alps, and the splendid gardens of Isola Madre, Isola Bella and the Villa del Balbianello
• Discover Puglia, where agriculture and horticulture converge, and delight in the quaint historic towns of Lecce and Alberobello
• Experience the richness of Italian culture in the country’s superb archaeological museums and distinctive regional cuisines

 

ITINERARY

 

MONDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2018 / DEPART AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND

Suggested departure from Australia or New Zealand in the afternoon on Qantas/Emirates flights to Milan via Dubai. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements.

 

TUE 11 SEP / ARRIVE MILAN – LAKE MAGGIORE

Suggested arrival in Milan in the morning. Group transfer (included in tour price) from central Milan (14:00) or Milan Malpensa Airport (15:15) to Stresa on the shores of Lake Maggiore.
Check in to the hotel in the afternoon, before a special welcome dinner with Sandy and fellow travellers in the evening. (D)

 

WED 12 SEP / LAKE MAGGIORE

Explore Isola Madre, the largest of the islands of Lake Maggiore, where the wealthy Borromeo family constructed an elegant palace in the 16th century. Surrounding the palace are 8 hectares of botanical gardens all’inglese (in the English style), spread across seven terraces featuring palms, cypresses, rhododendrons and camellias.
Then visit Isola Bella, another of the beautiful ‘Borromean Islands’ of Lake Maggiore, whose 17th century palace was built by Count Borromeo for his wife Isabella (from which the island derives its name). Ten terraces of gardens and the gentle lakeside environment have allowed the flourishing of species from hydrangeas to ginkgos, Greek strawberry trees and a colossal camphor laurel, a species first introduced to curious Europeans in the writings of Marco Polo. (BD)

 

THU 13 SEP / LAKE MAGGIORE

In the morning, visit Villa Taranto, whose expansive gardens were created by Capt. Neil McEacharn in the 1930s in imitation of the landscape gardens of his native Scotland. Gathering plant specimens from around the world, this ‘Laird of the Lake’ established an estate whose botanical riches are matched only by its aesthetic beauty, graced by fountains, greenhouses, wells and statues. In autumn, the turn of season paints the oak and maple foliage red and gold, and the boughs of persimmon trees hang heavy with ripening fruits.
The afternoon is at leisure to enjoy the languid beauty of Lake Maggiore in the autumn, followed by dinner at a local restaurant in Stresa. (BD)

 

FRI 14 SEP / LAKE MAGGIORE – LAKE COMO

Travel eastwards from Lake Maggiore to Lake Como, one of the deepest in Europe at more than 400m in depth.
Explore the Villa del Balbianello, a meeting place for Italian republicans in the early 19th century who gathered there to plan the unification of the various states that covered the Italian peninsula at the time. The gardens of the villa were significantly developed by the Visconti family in the 19th century.
Continue to the Villa Carlotta, a magnificent 18th century edifice standing above terraced gardens which look over Lake Como to the Alps beyond. The 8 hectare botanical garden features azaleas, rhododendrons, camellias and orange trees. (BD)

 

SAT 15 SEP / LAKE COMO

The day begins with a visit to the Giardini di Villa Melzi di Bella. The villa was built between 1808 and 1810 by the Count of Lodi, and its architecture recalls the Neo-Classicism of the Napoleonic Era. The surrounding park contains Greek and Roman-style sculptures, as well as a tranquil Japanese reflecting pond.
Continue to the Villa Monastero, built on the site of a 12th century Cistercian convent, whose paths wend their way through gardens planted with kumquats, lemon, lime, myrtle and agave. (BL)

 

SUN 16 SEP / LAKE COMO (LAKE LUGANO)

Enjoy a day trip to Lake Lugano, straddling the border between Italy and Switzerland. Historically contested between the Duchy of Milan and the Bishopric of Como, Lake Lugano is now an oasis of tranquillity, and its delightful gardens benefit from an almost Mediterranean microclimate – not to mention a spectacular panoramic backdrop. A boat cruise along the lake offers a breathtaking panorama of deep blue waters, rising green foothills and great grey Alpine peaks. (BL)

 

MON 17 SEP / LAKE COMO – LECCE

Early in the morning, check out from the hotel and transfer to Milan for a flight to Brindisi in Puglia.
On arrival in Brindisi, transfer to Lecce, our base for the next three nights.
Enjoy dinner at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

TUE 18 SEP / LECCE

Begin your exploration of Puglia with a tour of the town of Lecce, whose abundance of Baroque sculptures has earnt it the moniker ‘The Florence of the South’. Thousands of years of human habitation and a naturally workable local stone known as pietra leccese (Lecce stone) have graced Lecce with monuments including a Roman theatre, a 16th century triumphal arch and several fine 17th century churches.
Delve into Puglia’s rich history in the Faggiano Museum. The museum was created in 2008 from the private residence of restaurateur Luciano Faggiano, who had been digging beneath his floor to repair some sewage pipes when he uncovered layers of history stretching back more than 2,500 years, including the remains of a 16th century Franciscan convent, a 12th century Templar home and a treasure trove of historical relics from Roman times. (BL)

 

WED 19 SEP / LECCE

Spend a day exploring the Salento Peninsula, the ‘high heel’ of the Italian boot. Travel to the town of Otranto, whose distinctive 15th century Aragonese Castle, in the shape of a very irregular pentagon, commands a port which has been home to Greeks, Romans, Ottomans and Siculo-Normans across the millennia of its existence.
Continue to the stunning Cava di Bauxite, where a small blue lake fringed with verdant vegetation sits within the brick-red earth that gives the area its name.
After lunch, visit the La Cutura Botanic Garden in Giuggianello, a 35 hectare garden designed in the late 19th century style and containing a collection of rare tropical plants and grasses, as well as an ornate Italian-style garden, a rose garden and a grove of plants native to Lecce. (BL)

 

THU 20 SEP / LECCE – ALBEROBELLO

In the morning, check out of the hotel and travel to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed town of Alberobello. Alberobello is famous for its quaint trulli, whitewashed houses built with conical grey drystone roofs dating from the 18th century.
Like so many good stories, the history of the trulli begins with a clever act of tax avoidance: by not using mortar in the building of the roof, the owner of the house could avoid the application of the imperial building tax, either because the residence was deemed ‘temporary’ or because it could be dismantled when tax inspectors were in the area. There are around 1,400 trulli in the town, and even the church is in the form of a trullo.
In the evening, check into the hotel, a magnificently restored 1700s masseria (traditional Pugliese farmhouse) surrounded by groves of olives, citrus and carob trees which was once a meeting place for the Knights Hospitaller. (BD)

 

FRI 21 SEP / ALBEROBELLO

In the morning, explore the fascinating sassi of Matera, in the neighbouring Region of Basilicata. The sassi are cave-houses dug directly into the limestone hillside of Matera, and were continuously inhabited for 9,000 years until the remaining inhabitants were moved into modern housing in the 1950s. In recent decades, the sassi have been carefully restored, and are now home to shops, restaurants and hotels.
After lunch, continue to Castel del Monte, a defensive fortress built in the 1240s by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. The World Heritage-listed fortress is unusual for being constructed in an octagonal shape with an octagonal tower on each corner. (BLD)

 

SAT 22 SEP / ALBEROBELLO

Explore the gardens of Masseria Salinola, an estate which was once a salt warehouse, and still produces fine extra-virgin olive oil from trees dating back more than a century.
Continue to Martina Franca, a charming white city in the Murge Hills graced with a collection of Baroque and Rococo churches. Explore the Palazzo Ducale, where Late Mannerism gives way to the Baroque, and admire the façade of the Church of San Domenico designed by the Domenican Friar Antonio Cantalupi. Visit the Basilica of San Martino, arguably one of the finest examples of Late Baroque architecture in all Puglia, whose richly embellished interior and exterior prefigure the development of the mid-18th century Rococo style.
In the evening, enjoy a special farewell dinner with Sandy and fellow travellers. (BD)

 

SUN 23 SEP / ALBEROBELLO – BARI – DEPART BARI
Transfer from Alberobello to Bari Airport.

Tour arrangements conclude on arrival at Bari Airport at 11:00 for flights departing from 13:00 onwards. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements. (B)

 

Autumn & the Art of the Japanese Garden

Autumn & the Art of the Japanese Garden

 

Tour Highlights

 

Travel with Jim Fogarty, award-winning landscape architect and author, on this tour of Japan in Autumn, when Japan’s countryside explodes into symphonies of glorious colour.
Visit a diverse range of Japan’s traditional gardens including: Kinkaku-ji (the Golden Pavilion) & Ryoan-ji (Dragon Peace Temple) in Kyoto, Isui-en in Nara, Kenroku-en in Kanazawa and Koraku-en in Okayama. We also visit a number of small gardens by special appointment.
Explore some of Japan’s splendid art collections, including Tokyo’s Suntory Museum of Art and the National Museum, the National Treasure Museum in Nara, and the magnificent collection of kimonos at Itchiku Kubota Art Museum at the foot of Mt Fuji.
Visit the Jiyu Gakuen School in Tokyo, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright when he lived in Japan.
Accompanied by architect Riccardo Tossani, visit a private Tokyo residence that he designed.
Experience Japan’s unique culture at a tea ceremony at Kodai-ji in Kyoto and lunch at the delightful teahouse of Happo-en in Tokyo.
View the great Buddha at Nara’s impressive Todai-ji complex, the world’s largest timber building.
Explore the historic Kiso Valley, witnessing the distinctive wooden architecture of the Edo era.
Stay one night in Nara in a ryokan – a traditional Japanese inn (or in western-style accommodation at the Nikko Nara Hotel).
Sample an array of traditional cuisine types, including shabu-shabu, teppan-yaki, oskashi and kaiseki.
Conclude with a visit to the Adachi Museum of Art, where a collection of contemporary Japanese art is harmoniously set within one of the most beautiful and admired contemplative gardens in the country.

 

Tour Overview

 

The tour has been timed to visit Japan when its countryside explodes into symphonies of glorious autumnal colour. In Tokyo and in historic centres like Kyoto and Nara we’ll discover how Japan’s gardens can be experienced on many levels and are renowned for subtly combining artifice and nature, blurring the boundaries between garden and landscape. Some gardens are tiny and minimalist, conveying subtle meanings through ingenious combinations of moss, stones, rock and water. Others are grand, framing rich palaces and temples like Tokyo’s Imperial Palace Garden. In Tokyo, highlights include Happo-en where ladies in kimonos serve lunch in a delightful teahouse before we stroll through the gardens viewing 200-year-old bonsai trees. Tokyo National Museum and Suntory Museum of Art offer masterpieces to inspire you, and we will explore examples of contemporary garden design and landscaping in this most modern city. In Kyoto we combine garden visits with expressions of traditional Japanese culture like tea ceremonies, geisha rituals and cuisine. Kyoto gardens include such extensive, ancient temple and garden complexes as Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion), Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) and Ryoan-ji – the famed Dragon Peace Temple. Throughout, garden visits are also combined with an appreciation of Japan’s traditional architecture and great museums to enrich our understanding of Japanese aesthetics. In 8th-century capital Nara, architectural treasures, great collections and fine gardens include the Todai-ji, the world’s largest timber building, Kofuku-ji with a five-storey pagoda and treasure trove of Buddhist statues; we also visit Nara National Museum. At Kanazawa we explore traditional construction techniques at Kanazawa Castle, Nagamachi Samurai Residence and Higashichaya District’s many old Samurai houses. Kanazawa’s Kenroku-en is the ‘garden of the six sublimities’. We also make a very special day tour to villages in Kiso Valley, carefully preserved monuments to Japan’s feudal past, and stroll Japan’s greatest natural symbol, Mt Fuji. Our tour finishes with a visit to the Adachi Museum of Art. In addition to its stunning collection of contemporary Japanese art, the museum is renowned for its beautiful contemplation garden which visitors enjoy through large picture windows.

 

16-day Cultural Garden Tour of Japan in Autumn

 

Overnight Tokyo (3 nights) • Kawaguchiko (1 night) • Matsumoto (2 nights) • Kanazawa (1 night) • Kyoto (3 nights) • Nara (1 night) • Kyoto (3 nights) • Matsue (1 night)

 

Tokyo – 3 nights

 

Day 1: Wednesday 13 November, Arrive Tokyo

Arrival transfer for those travelling on the ASA ‘designated’ flight
Japanese Imperial Palace Plaza
Koishikawa Koraku-en Garden
Light Dinner
After our arrival in Tokyo those taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight will be transferred in a private vehicle to the Hotel New Otani Tokyo. This hotel stands within a beautiful traditional Japanese garden originally designed for the daimyo (feudal lord) Kato Kiyomasa, Lord of Kumamoto in Kyustiu over four hundred years ago. This garden is well worth strolling through and will introduce you to many facets of the Japanese gardens we shall visit in the coming weeks.

After time to rest at the hotel, we begin our tour with a visit to the Japanese Imperial Palace Plaza, the home of the reigning emperor of Japan and his family. We enter via the Nijubashi, where two picturesque bridges span the moat. The Higashi Gyo-en, or East Garden, was opened to the public in 1968 and provides an attractive environment in which to stroll and relax.

We then visit a rare surviving 17th-century strolling garden, located in the west of the city. Koishikawa Koraku-en was designed in part by Zhu Shun Shui, a Ming dynasty refugee from China, and the garden recreates both Japanese and Chinese landscapes. Here we find waterfalls, ponds, stone lanterns, a small lake with gnarled pines and humped bridges.

Tonight we enjoy a light dinner together at our hotel. (Overnight Tokyo) D

 

Day 2: Thursday 14 November, Tokyo

Suntory Museum of Art
Happo-en Garden
Welcome Lunch at Happo-en Gardens Teahouse
Residence ‘R’ with Riccardo Tossani
The Suntory Museum of Art was founded in Tokyo’s Marunouchi district in 1961 as the cultural arm of a famous distillery. ‘Beauty in Everyday Life’ has been the theme of the museum since its establishment when the then President of Suntory, Keizo Saji, developed what is now a 3000-piece collection containing priceless ceramics, folding screens, kimonos, lacquer-ware, textiles and glasswork. Its aim is to relate old things to the new, present beauty over time, and to represent beauty without regard for cultural frontiers of countries and races.

To enhance this philosophy of fusing the ‘traditional’ with the ‘contemporary’, the museum relocated in 2007 to its current Tokyo Mid-town location to be part of the art district known as the Roppongi art triangle. Architect Kengo Kuma, whose aim was to create ‘a Japanese-style room in the city’, designed its new home using new technology and traditional Japanese design elements. The architect’s signature vertical lattice design covers the exterior, while the interior features a sliding 10-metre-high lattice that controls the flow of light. Natural materials like laminated paulownia wood for the interior lattice, washi for the atrium walls, and recycled whiskey barrel wood (a connection to the Suntory distillery) for the flooring create a feeling of warmth throughout the building.

Meaning ‘beautiful from any angle’, the Happo-en garden lives up to its name. Following a Welcome Lunch at the garden’s delightful teahouse, where ladies in kimono will serve you matcha (green tea) and okashi (variety of snacks), a stroll through the gardens will reveal 200-year-old bonsai trees, a stone lantern said to have been carved 800 years ago, and a central pond.

Our final visit today is to a private Tokyo residence designed by architect Riccardo Tossani, who will personally show us his work, explaining the concepts and influences. (Overnight Tokyo) BL

 

Day 3: Friday 15 November, Tokyo

Jiyu Gakuen School
Tokyo National Museum
Ekouin Nenbutsudo Temple by Yutaka Kawahara Design Studio
We begin our day with a visit to the Jiyu Gakuen School. This is a beautifully preserved building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1921, one of 12 buildings the American designed during the two years he lived in Japan. Only three of Wright’s buildings survived the 20th century, and we shall be taken on a tour of this very special building.

Established in 1872, the Tokyo National Museum is the oldest and largest museum in Japan. The museum, which holds over 110,000 objects, focuses on ancient Japanese art and Asian art along the Silk Road. There is also a large collection of Greco-Buddhist art.

During our travels we’ll encounter many traditional and historic temples and explore a variety of gardens that play such an important role in these complexes. This afternoon we visit a contemporary temple – the Ekouin Nenbutsudo Temple by Yutaka Kawahara Design Studio. Completed in 2013, in the lively heart of Tokyo, this Buddhist complex is intended to represent the ‘Gokuraku’ or ‘Paradise in the Sky’ and is comprised of the three traditional structures associated with Buddhist architecture – the vihara (monastery), the stupa (pagoda), and the shrine – stacked one atop the other in response to its compact site. In place of a small stroll garden using moss, stone or sand, here bamboo is used to create a green space for contemplation in this busy metropolis. (Overnight Tokyo) B

 

Kawaguchiko – 1 night

 

Day 4: Saturday 16 November, Tokyo – Kawaguchiko

Sankei-en (Sankei’s Garden)
Itchiku Kubota Art Museum
Today we depart Tokyo by coach and travel west to the iconic Mount Fuji, the largest volcano in Japan. This is Japan’s highest peak at 3776 metres. It last erupted in 1707 and forms a near perfect cone. Mount Fuji is arguably Japan’s most important landmark, which stands for the nation’s identity. It has been pictured countless times, not least in Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1826-1833).

On the way to Mount Fuji we visit the beautiful Sankei-en, a spacious Japanese-style garden in southern Yokohama, in which are set a number of historic buildings from across Japan. There are a pond, small rivers, a profusion of flowers and wonderful scrolling trails. The garden, built by Hara Sankei, was opened to the public in 1904. Among the historic buildings in the park are the elegant residence of a daimyo (feudal lord), several teahouses, and the main hall and three storied pagoda of Tomyo-ji, the abandoned temple of Kyoto.

In Kawaguchiko we will visit the Itchiku Kubota Art Museum. When the artist Itchiku Kubota was young, he encountered an example of ‘Tsujigahana’ at the Tokyo National Museum. ‘Tsujigahana’ was a technique used in dying kimonos during the 15th and 16th century, an art that was later lost. Kubota-san revived the art and created a series of kimonos decorated with mountain landscapes in all four seasons and Mount Fuji. These kimonos are displayed in a breathtaking setting. The main building is a pyramid-shaped structure supported by 16 Hiba (cypress) wooden beams more than 1000 years old. Other parts of the museum, displaying an antique glass bead collection, are constructed of Ryukyu limestone. The museum’s unique architecture is set against a lovely garden and red pine forest. Tonight we dine together at the hotel. (Overnight Kawaguchiko) BD

Note: Our luggage will be transported separately to our hotel in Matsumoto. An overnight bag will be needed for use in Kawaguchiko.

 

Matsumoto – 2 nights

 

Day 5: Sunday 17 November, Kawaguchiko – Matsumoto

Fifth Station of Mt Fuji
Nakamachi Street and Kurassic-kan
Matsumoto Rising Castle
Japan Ukiyo-e Museum
We start our day with a visit to the Fifth Station (Kawaguchi-ko) at the Fuji Five Lakes, where, weather permitting, we can enjoy spectacular views of the snow-capped peak. A gentle stroll will allow us to identify some of the native flora of this region.

We then focus upon Matsumoto and its surrounds for the next two days. On arrival in the town, we walk through the historic Nakamachi-dori, a street lined with white-walled traditional inns, restaurants and antique shops. Here we visit the Nakamachi Kurassic-kan, an historic sake brewery with black-beamed interiors and traditional plaster-work outside. We cross the river to walk along the market street Nawate-dori before arriving at Matsumoto-jo, the imposing castle approached across a moat.

Matsumoto-jo was founded by the Ogasawara clan in 1504 but it was another lord, Ishikawa, who remodeled the fortress in 1593 and built the imposing black five-tier donjon that is now the oldest keep in Japan. From the top of the tower we enjoy spectacular views of the town and surrounding mountains.

We end our day with a visit to the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum, a privately owned art museum that houses the world’s largest collection of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e). The Sakai family started collecting ukiyo-e in the mid-19th century and subsequent generations built an outstanding corpus of historic and contemporary works. They established the museum in 1982.(Overnight Matsumoto) B

 

Day 6: Monday 18 November, Matsumoto – Kiso Valley – Matsumoto

Narai
Tsumago
Magome
Nagiso Town Museum
Today we drive out of Matsumoto and head to the Kiso Valley for a taste of how Japan looked prior to urbanisation. Developed by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu as one of the five main highways linking his capital Edo (Tokyo) with the rest of Japan, the valley contains eleven post towns and three of them, Narai, Tsumago and Magone, have been preserved as a virtual museum of the feudal past.

At Narai we see distinctive wooden buildings with window shutters and renji-goshi latticework. We shall visit the Kashira-ningyo where colourfully painted dolls and toys are still made. Nakamura House dates from the 1830s and was the home of a merchant who manufactured combs, one of the area’s specialties. You will have time to visit this and explore side streets where there are temples and shrines and the famous Kiso-no-Ohashi, an arched wooden bridge that crosses the Narai-gawa.

As we follow the valley we’ll enjoy features of the Nakasendo route, including Kiso Fukushima, the location of a major barrier, but today the gateway to the sacred mountain of Ontake.

Tsumago was a ghost town 30 years ago, with its traditional Edo-era houses on the point of collapse. Its restoration sparked the idea of cultural preservation in Japan. The pedestrian-only street is similar to that once encountered by lords and their samurai centuries ago. The highlight of Tsumago is Okuya Kyodokan, a folk museum inside a designated post inn, where the daimyo’s (feudal lord) retinue rested. On the opposite side of the street the Kyu-honjin is where the daimyo used to stay.

Our third village stop is Magome, which means ‘horse-basket’, because this is where travellers were forced to leave their horses before tackling the mountainous roads ahead.

Our final visit for the day is to the Nagiso Town Museum. Opened in 1995, the museum has three divisions: Tsumago Post Town Honjin, a sub-honjin, and a history museum. (A honjin is a temporary residence for a lord or dignitary to stay in when travelling to and from the shogunate capital of Edo.) The present building of the subhonjin was built in 1878 utilising Japanese cypress throughout, a type of wood proscribed for ordinary construction during the Edo period (1600-1868). The History Museum contains historical materials of Nagiso Town and history of the trust organisation dedicated to the preservation of historic towns, villages, and neighbourhoods. From here we return to Matsumoto, where you can explore the city on your own and enjoy dinner at a traditional restaurant. (Overnight Matsumoto) B

 

Kanazawa – 1 night

 

Day 7: Tuesday 19 November, Matsumoto – Kanazawa

Shinkansen Superexpress train to Kanazawa
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum for Traditional Products and Crafts
Nomura-ke (restored samurai residence & house garden)
Higashi-Chayamachi District
This morning we travel by coach to Nagano, where we board the new Shinkansen Superexpress train to Kanazawa, considered one Japan’s best-preserved Edo-period cities. The Japanese visit Kanazawa in droves but perhaps because of its remote location and very cold winters few foreigners make the journey to experience its rich cultural legacies.

On arrival we visit the Museum for Traditional Products and Crafts, which showcases the fine arts and crafts of Ishikawa, a Prefecture whose culture of fine arts and traditional crafts compares with that of Tokyo and Kyoto. Highlights of the collection include feudal daimyo utensils using the Kaga Makie technique, Kutani porcelain from Ko-kutani (Old Kutani) and Wajima lacquer-ware.

The feudal atmosphere of Kanazawa still lingers in the Nagamachi district, where old houses of the Nagamachi Samurai line the streets that once belonged to Kaga Clan Samurais. The T-shaped and L-shaped alleys are distinct characteristics of the feudal town, and the mud doors and gates of the houses remain the same as they were 400 years ago. The houses with their samurai windows (bushimado) and mud walls under the yellow Kobaita wooden roofs, which were protected from snow by straw mats (komo), evoke a bygone era.

During the Edo Period (1603-1867), the scale and dispensation of land to samurai families who lived in this district, and others in the city, was a fairly accurate indicator of rank. One of the larger Nagamachi estates was assigned to Nomura Denbei Nobusada, a senior official in the service of the first feudal lord of the Kaga domain. The reforms that accompanied the Meiji Restoration in 1868 decimated the lifestyles of the socially privileged. The samurai, whose social class was nulified, not only had their stipends terminated, but their estates were also appropriated by the state. Consequently, the Nomura family, whose considerable land holdings dated back 12 generations, lost their home and were reduced to turning a section of the remaining part of their property over to the cultivation of fruit and vegetables. Though they were discouraged from public displays of ostentation, merchant families and those of former samurai were not prohibited from commissioning the construction of exquisite gardens.

We visit the restored residence of Nomura, displaying the lifestyle and artifacts of the era, and explore its garden which features trees that are over 400 years old. Broad, irregularly shaped stepping stones provide access to the inner garden whose attractive entrance is flanked by a Chinese maple tree with leaves that turn a brilliant red in autumn.

Across the Asano River is the district of Higashi-Chayamachi, Kanazawa’s most famous geisha district. Many of the tall wooden-latticed houses on the narrow streets are still used by geisha for high-class entertainment as they have done since 1820 when the area was established as a geisha quarter. You can take tea (without geisha) at Shima House for a chance to experience its refined and elegant atmosphere. Like Kyoto’s Gion, this district has been designated as one of Japan’s cultural assets. (Overnight Kanazawa) B

Note: Our luggage will be transported directly from Matsumoto to our hotel in Kyoto. An overnight bag will be needed for use in Kanazawa.

 

Kyoto – 3 nights

 

Day 8: Wednesday 20 November, Kanazawa – Kyoto

Kanazawa Castle, Kanazawa
Kenroku-en, Kanazawa
Train from Kanazawa to Kyoto
Gion District, Kyoto
Our first destination this morning is Kanazawa Castle, the seat of power of the local Maeda clan, hereditary feudal lords (daimyo) of the Kaga province from 1583. Burnt down on a number of occasions, only the superb Ishikawa Gate and the Sanjikken Nagaya samurai dwelling survive from the original construction.

Kenroku-en is Kanazawa’s prime attraction and one of the three most famous gardens in Japan, along with Koraku-en (Okayama) and Kairaku-en (Mito). Kenroku-en was once the outer garden of Kanazawa Castle and there has been a garden on the site since the late 1600s. The original garden, begun by the fifth Maeda lord, Tsunonori Maeda, was called Renchi tei but it was almost entirely burnt out in 1759. It was restored in the 1770s and in 1822 became known as Kenroku-en, a name that means ‘the garden of six sublimities’ or, ‘a garden combining the six aspects of a perfect garden’. These six features were what the Chinese traditionally believed were necessary for the ideal garden – spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, water-courses and panoramas: all these characteristics are to be found in the 25 acres of this beautiful garden.

We then transfer to the train station to take the train south to Kyoto. Kyoto was the capital of Japan from the late 8th century (c.794 AD) until 1868, when the court was moved to Tokyo. It is home to 17 World Heritage Sites, 1600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines, yet much of the city centre is modern. One of the finest of its contemporary buildings is its dramatic railway station.

We begin our exploration of Kyoto with a glimpse of a vanishing world – the district of Gion, home to geisha houses and traditional teahouses. Although the number of geishas has declined over the last century the area is still famous for the preservation of forms of traditional architecture and entertainment. To experience the traditional Gion, we stroll along Hanami-koji, a street lined by beautiful old buildings, including teahouses, where you may be able to glimpse a geisha apprentice. Contrary to popular belief Gion is not a red-light district, nor are geishas prostitutes. Geishas are young girls or women extensively trained as entertainers and skilled in a number of traditional Japanese arts such as classical music and dance as well as the performance of the exacting rituals of a Japanese tea ceremony. (Overnight Kyoto) B

 

Day 9: Thursday 21 November, Kyoto

Kinkaku-ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion)
Daitoku-ji Buddhist Complex incl. the Ryogen-in
Ryoan-ji (Dragon Peace Temple)
Kyoto is notable for its extraordinary diversity of Japanese gardens, including many of the finest traditional temple gardens. Our first visit in Kyoto is to the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji). During the 15th century the Chinese Sung Dynasty exercised an enormous influence in Japan as artists, poets and Zen priests were gathered together by Yoshimitsu, the third Ashikaga shogun (1358-1409). Yoshimitsu began construction of the Golden Pavilion just before he retired in 1394, handing power to his nine-year-old son so that he could move to his estate. Little of his work remains but we can sense the character of the garden in its pond, rockwork and extensive plantings.

The pavilion at Kinkaku-ji recalls Sung period architecture but it is a recreation, having been burned down in the 1950s. The present building is an exact replica except that where Yoshimitsu proposed only to gild the ceiling of the third storey with gold; now the whole building is gilded. Yoshimitsu positioned his palace on the edge of a lake. The ground floor was a reception room for guests and departure point for leisure boating, the first storey was for philosophical discussions and panoramic views of the lake while the upper floor acted as a refuge for Yoshimitsu and was used for tea ceremonies. The size of the gardens is increased visually by the water’s convoluted edge, the use of rocks and clipped trees and by visually ‘borrowing’ a distant view of Mt Kinugasa that creates a sense of gradation between foreground, middleground and deep distance.

We next visit Daitoku-ji, a large complex of Zen temples with prayer halls, religious structures and 23 sub-temples with some of the most exquisite gardens in Kyoto, some quite small, including raked gravel gardens and, in the Daisen-in, one of the most celebrated small rock gardens in Japan. The Japanese consider Daitoku-ji one of the most privileged places to study and it is associated with many of Japan’s most famous priests. Unlike many of the larger public Buddhist temples of earlier sects, the Rinzai sect monasteries were intimate, inward looking and remained isolated from the outside world.

The temple received imperial patronage and thus grew out from its centre in an organic way. A transition occurred as the complex expanded from a formal centre to semiformal and informal precincts. The central north-south walkway is most formal with wide paths to accommodate processions and ceremonies, while to the side are sub-temples with gates. As you walk through one of these gates you immediately come upon a less formal world with narrow paths, turns and walkways. The temple site contains a number of notable gardens including Daisen-in, Koto-in, Koho-an, Hogo and Ryogen-in.

We conclude the day with a visit to Ryoan-ji – the Dragon Peace Temple. No other garden in the world is so simple, elegant and refined. The garden comprises 15 rocks in a sea of raked gravel surrounded by a compacted mud wall coated in oil that is in itself a national treasure. The garden dates from 1500 as part of a temple of the Renzai sect of Zen Buddhism. The temple burned but was reconstructed in its original form. The garden constitutes the supreme example of a dry garden where gravel and rock symbolise plant and water elements. Indeed, apart from the moss on the rocks, no other plants grow in it. The meaning of the garden remains unknown. It might symbolise islands in a sea, mountains seen through clouds or tigers and cubs crossing a river, but this doesn’t matter since this is a garden to encourage contemplation, the enclosing wall separating the visitor from the world outside, and the verandah creating a horizontal boundary. (Overnight Kyoto) B

 

Day 10: Friday 22 November, Kyoto

Renge-ji
Shisen-do
Lunch at the Beaux Sejours, Grand Prince Hotel
Ginkaku-ji (Temple of the Silver Pavilion)
Today we will visit a number of Kyoto’s great gardens. Our first visit for the day is to Renge-ji. The temple is known for its garden, which reflects the beauty of seasonal change. Autumn when the maple leaves change colour, is the best season to visit. Capturing the essence of Japanese gardens, it includes a central pond surrounded by plantings linking to the hillside beyond. Stones, bridge and plantings are all reflected on the water-surface, giving a sense of spaciousness.

The intimate gardens of Shisen-do are considered masterworks of Japanese gardens. Its street walls mask the tranquillity and beauty to be found within. Raked sand, clipped azaleas and the tree covered hillsides of Higashiyama form the main components of this garden designed by Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672). Clipped azaleas give way to natural vegetation beyond the garden boundary but it is the close harmony between the indoor spaces of the pavilion and the garden beyond that is most striking. The verandah offers a transition between its dark interior and the light-filled garden.

Following lunch at the Grand Prince Hotel’s Beaux Sejours restaurant, we visit Ginkaku-ji. Originally constructed as the retirement villa of the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1435-1490), the Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion) became a Zen temple upon his death. The garden is complex, comprising two distinct sections, a pond area with a composition of rocks and plants, and a sand garden with a truncated cone – the Moon-Viewing Height – suggesting Mt Fuji; and a horizontal mound – the Sea of Silver Sand – named for its appearance by moonlight. An educational display at the garden contains good moss and weed moss to allow you to tell the difference. (Overnight Kyoto) BL

 

Nara – 1 night

 

Day 11: Saturday 23 November, Kyoto – Nara

Nara Park (Nara-koen) including the temples of Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji
Isui-en Garden
Traditional Japanese bath (optional)
We leave Kyoto by coach for the ancient Japanese city of Nara, the national capital prior to Kyoto. During this period Buddhism became firmly established in Japan under the patronage of nobles who sponsored the buildings and works of art that we shall visit.

Our first destination is to the impressive Todai-ji, founded in 745 by Emperor Shomu. Although rebuilt following a fire in 1709 to two-thirds of its original size it nevertheless remains the largest timber building in the world. Two seven-metre tall guardian gods flank the entrance, (known as the nandai-mon), to the great Buddha Hall, the Daibutsu-den, which houses the 15-metre-tall bronze statue of the great Buddha. The original casting was completed in 752, when an Indian priest stood on a special platform and symbolically opened its eyes by painting on the Buddha’s eyes with a huge brush. This ceremony was performed before the then retired Emperor Shomu, his wife Komio and the reigning Empress Kogen, together with ambassadors from China, India and Persia.

We then visit the wonderful Nara-koen complex. It contains a five-storey pagoda, part of the Kofuku-ji founded in 669, a fine collection of Buddhist statues in the kokuhokan (National Treasure Building) and a 15th-century hall to the north of the pagoda. The kokahokan is a treasure trove of early Buddhist statues and although it is not large, each piece has been carefully chosen as a masterpiece of its style and period.

Our final visit for the day is to the small Isui-en, a traditional Japanese garden notable for its extensive use of moss and its exquisite tea pavilion. This garden is a kaiyushiki teien (strolling) style design that allows the visitor to easily walk through the garden and view it from many different angles.

From here you might like to stroll through some of Nara’s historic streets or try a traditional Japanese bath (sento: public bath; onsen: hot spring bath). The traditional Japanese-style inn we are staying in tonight provides open-air communal baths using hot spring water and affords a wonderful view of Kofuku-ji Temple’s five-storey pagoda, which is illuminated at night. Tonight we dine in a traditional style at the Ryokan Asukasou, which serves Japanese kaiseki dishes. (Overnight Nara) BD

Note: We will leave our main luggage at the hotel in Kyoto during our 1 night stay in Nara. An overnight bag will be needed for use in Nara

 

Kyoto – 3 nights

 

Day 12: Sunday 24 November, Nara – Kyoto

Treasures of the Nara National Museum
Shin-Yakushi-ji
Horyu-ji
Our first visit today is to the Nara National Museum, noted for its collection of Buddhist art, including images, sculpture and ceremonial articles.

Shin-Yakushi-ji is a Buddhist temple built in the 19th year of the Tempyo era (747) by Empress Komio as an offering of thanksgiving when Emperor Shomu recovered from an eye disease. It now constitutes a single hall enshrining a powerful image of Yakushi Nyorai, the Healing Buddha, surrounded by clay sculptures of 12 guardians called Juni Shinsho, the Yakushi Nyorai’s protective warriors. In Japanese sculpture and art, the warriors are almost always grouped in a protective circle around the Yakushi Nyorai; they are rarely depicted as single figures. Many say they represent the 12 vows of Yakushi; others believe the 12 were present when the historical Buddha introduced the ‘Healing Sutra’; others claim that they offer protection during the 12 daylight hours, or that they represent the 12 months and 12 cosmic directions, or the 12 animals of the 12-year Chinese zodiac.

The grounds of Horyu-ji house the world’s oldest surviving wooden structures, dating from the Asuka Period (mid-6th-beginning of 8th century AD). Throughout the 187,000-square-metre grounds are irreplaceable cultural treasures, bequeathed across the centuries and continuing to preserve the essence of eras spanning the entire journey through Japanese history since the 7th century. Horyu-ji contains over 2300 important cultural and historical structures and articles, including nearly 190 that have been designated as National Treasures or important Cultural Properties. In 1993 Horyu-ji was selected by UNESCO as part of the World Heritage as a unique storehouse of world Buddhist culture. Following this visit we transfer by coach to Kyoto. (Overnight Kyoto) B

 

Day 13: Monday 25 November, Kyoto

Tenryu-ji
Saiho-ji (or ‘Koke-dera’ – moss temple)
Nanzen-ji
Nishiki-koji Covered Market
We first visit the Tenryu-ji, which dates from the period of shogun Ashikaga Takauji (1339). He commissioned the priest Muso Kokushi – one of Japan’s best known garden designers, who also designed the moss garden at Saiho-ji – to create this garden. Kokushi’s work modified an estate of Emperor Gosaga from 1270. He changed its form to include an Heian-style pond garden with popular, contemporary Chinese aspects. These included most notably a group of seven vertical rocks near the rear shore of its pond. These contrast markedly with Japanese rock work that takes a more horizontal form. This is one of the earliest gardens to show shakkei, the incorporation of borrowed landscape into a garden’s design.

Saiho-ji has the oldest major garden of the Muromachi Period. Originally designed to represent the Western Paradise (or Pure Land) of Amida Buddhism, this so-called ‘strolling garden’ is set in a dark forest and is designed for meditation. It was re-designed by a Zen Buddhist priest, Muso Soseki, who also designed the garden of Tenryu-ji in Kyoto, when it passed to the Zen Buddhist sect. The chief feature of the garden is the ‘golden pond’ with pavilions scattered on its shore and connected by a path that allows controlled views of the garden. The pond is shaped like the Japanese character for ‘heart’ or ‘spirit’. It is divided by islands connected by bridges. The mosses, which give the garden its alternative name (Koke-dera – ‘moss temple’) were established as an economy measure after the Meiji restoration (1868).

Nanzen-ji is one of the most famous Rinzai Zen temples in Japan. It was founded in 1291 by Emperor Kameyama, and was rebuilt several times after devastating fires. At the entrance to the complex one passes through the huge Imperial gate, built in 1628 by Todo Takatora, and into the complex with its series of sub-temples. We will see the hojo, or abbot’s quarters, which is notable for both it’s beautiful golden screen paintings and the tranquil sand and rock garden. We will also explore the sub-temple Konchi-in which was added to the complex in 1605.

In the late afternoon we shall walk through the traditional 17th-century Nishiki-koji covered market, which has for centuries been the focus of food shopping in the city. You may wish to try Japanese pickled vegetables or purchase teapots and teabowls from a traditional vendor. Nearby is a Japanese electrical store that show Japanese consumerism at its height. Spread over five storeys, this extraordinary store offers every imaginable electrical item. We will end the day in the fashionable gallery and restaurant area. (Overnight Kyoto) B

 

Day 14: Tuesday 26 November, Kyoto

Heian Shrine
Tofuku-ji
Tea Ceremony at Kodai-ji Temple
We begin the day with a visit to one of the newest religious sites in Kyoto, the Heian Shrine, which boasts the largest torii (sacred gate) in Japan and lovely gardens. The shrine was built in 1896 to commemorate the city’s 1100th anniversary and to honour its founder, Emperor Kammu and also to celebrate the culture and architecture of the city’s Heian-past. It is constructed on the site of the original Heian Hall of State but is a smaller and somewhat imperfect recreation of this earlier building. Four gardens surround the main shrine buildings on the south, west, middle and east, covering an area of approximately 33,000 square metres. The gardens are designated as a national scenic spot representative of Meiji-era (1868-1912) garden design.

We then visit the superb Tofuku-ji Hojo, a garden designed in 1939 by Shigemori Mirei. This will be familiar to many who have read books on Japanese gardens for it combines 20th-century design with elements from Japanese tradition. Mirei implements subtle, restrained design themes such as chequer-boards of stone in moss to allow the natural form and colour of maples on the surrounding hills to make full impact.

We end our visit to Kyoto with a visit to the Kodai-ji Temple to experience a tea ceremony. (Overnight Kyoto) B

 

Matsue – 1 night

 

Day 15: Wednesday 27 November, Kyoto – Okayama – Matsue
Kouraku-en, Okayama
Adachi Museum of Art
Farewell Dinner at a Local Restaurant
Today we depart Kyoto and travel by train to Okayama where we visit another of the country’s so-called ‘Three Great Gardens of Japan’, Kouraku-en. This garden dates from the Edo period when the daimyo (feudal lord) Ikeda Tsunamasa ordered its construction in 1687. Completed in 1700, it has retained its overall appearance with only a few minor changes made over the centuries. The garden was used for entertaining guests and also as a retreat for the daimyo.

In the afternoon we travel by train to Matsue, where we shall visit the Adachi Museum of Art, located in the rural landscape of the Sinmane region. This is a contemporary art museum set within a large garden, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful gardens in Japan. The museum was founded by Adachi Zenko who felt a strong resonance between the sublime sensibility of the Japanese-style garden and the paintings of Yokoyama Taikan whose work he collected. This is a contemplation garden which visitors observe from various carefully designed points within the museum. Each season reveals itself through different aspects of the garden, and during our visit we can expect the hills that form the backdrop to the vista before us to be a blaze of autumnal colour while vivid reds enliven the foliage of the garden. After checking in to our hotel, we shall enjoy a farewell dinner at a local restaurant. (Overnight Matsue) BD

Note: As we will be travelling by train today, our luggage will be transferred directly to the Matsue hotel

 

Day 16: Thursday 28 November, Depart Matsue

Izumo Shine
Shimane Museum of Ancient Izumo
This morning we travel from Matsue to the nearby town of Izumo to visit the Izumo-taisha, one of the oldest and most important Shinto shrines in Japan. Its foundation date is not known, but it was already a well established religious complex in the 10th century. The complex comprises of multiple prayer halls and sanctuaries. The artistic and archaeological treasures form this area are displayed next door to the shrine at the Shimane Museum of Ancient Izumo.

After lunchtime at leisure we transfer to Izumo Airport for our flights home. B

Spring Gardens of Victoria with Julie Kinney

Spring Gardens of Victoria – Private Gardens of Daylesford and Mount Macedon with Julie Kinney

 

24 October – 02 November 2018 (10 days)

 

HIGHLIGHTS…

 

In the springtime, joyous blossoms bedeck the charming towns of rural Victoria and the gardens of Daylesford and Mount Macedon.

 

AT A GLANCE…

 

• Visit a dozen private gardens in the Daylesford and Mount Macedon areas and meet some of the gardeners themselves
• Experience spring at Stonefields with a guided tour led by Paul Bangay
• Enjoy a picnic at Hanging Rock, the eerie setting for Peter Weir’s 1975 film
• Explore specialist nurseries at The Garden of St Erth, stocking cottage flower and vegetable seeds in an 1860s miner’s homestead and Lambley’s Nursery, a world leader in sustainable planting for dry climates
• Enjoy a special tour of the gardens and working horse stud at Swettenham Stud in Nagambie
• Go antiquing at the vast Newlyn Antiques and Gardens (or pick up a heritage apple or pear tree), and savour regional cuisine amongst gardens and in traditional country restaurants

Note: At time of publication (February 2018), most but not all garden visits were confirmed. Private owners, in particular, are reluctant to commit more than 2 to 3 months prior to visit. Therefore, while we undertake to operate the tour as published, there may be some changes to the itinerary

 

ITINERARY…

 

 WEDNESDAY 24 OCTOBER 2018 / MELBOURNE – LANCEFIELD

 

Meet Julie and fellow travellers at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at the Russell Court entrance at 10:00am. (Russell Court is an extension of Russell Street at the rear of Federations Square.) Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements.

Depart Melbourne for The Cottage at Bolobek, considered one of the finest private gardens of Australia. Once the home of Lady Joan Law-Smith, the walled rose garden, ornamental lake, woodland and crab-apple walk are some of the delights hidden within Bolobek’s garden spaces. Enjoy an introduction and tour of the garden, followed by lunch with a selection of produce from Bolobek’s veggie patch.

Travel next to Cope-William Winery for a visit to their contemporary art gallery and gardens. In the afternoon, check in to your hotel, and later enjoy a special welcome dinner. (LD)

 

TUE 25 OCT / LANCEFIELD

 

Start today with a visit to Ard Choille Heritage Gardens. Its exotic trees and shrubs encapsulate the atmosphere of a 19th century garden, with its notable inclusion of a rare 19th century metal shade house.

Following a tour of the gardens, enjoy lunch in the Gardens of Tieve Tara. With a fern glade, rose arbour, and two lakes complemented by a Monet-styled bridge, the garden foliage and flowers present a vibrant display of spring colours.

After lunch, depart for the private gardens of Dreamthorpe, with its romantic surroundings of elegant oak trees, wisteria and a secluded lake. Arrive back at your hotel for a late afternoon wine tasting in the on-site cellar. Later, enjoy dinner at a local restaurant in Lancefield, a village in the Macedon Ranges where pastoral heritage charm blends with a lively arts scene. (BLD)

 

FRI 26 OCT / LANCEFIELD

 

After breakfast, travel to the formal gardens of Sunnymeade, the 2017 winner of a Melbourne Cup Australian gardens competition. Explore its unique garden rooms, which includes a Persian-styled garden and Gothic-style building, and find a collection of rare and unusual perennials in Sunnymeade’s small nursery.

Continue to Swettenham Stud at Nagambie, located on the Goulburn River, for a tour of the gardens and the surrounding buildings. (B)

 

SAT 27 OCT / LANCEFIELD

 

Spend a morning at the local Lancefield farmers’ market, discovering local produce, plants and crafts.

Next, have a picnic at Hanging Rock, made famous as the setting of the 1975 film, with a walk around the unusual rock formations, created by years of erosion on this extinct volcano.

In the afternoon head to Chapman Hill Olives for a visit of the working olive grove and gardens. (BLD)

 

SUN 28 OCT / LANCEFIELD – HEPBURN SPRINGS

 

Check out from your hotel for an exploration of The Garden of St Erth, where over 3,000 plant varieties with a focus on drought tolerant flowers are showcased, along with the garden’s Diggers Club nursery. Travel to Lavandula Swiss Italian Farm for lunch and a tour of the historic 1850s stone farmhouse.

Later, visit Newlyn Antiques, with its vast collection of pottery, glassware, jewellery and furniture spread across three 19th century buildings. Nestled between, amongst landscaped grounds, is Newlyn’s cottage nursery specialising in Heritage varieties of irises, apples and pears. (BL)

 

MON 29 OCT / HEPBURN SPRINGS

 

This morning, depart for The Garden of Lixouri and Hedgehogs garden, with a photo stop en route at the Malmsbury viaduct. Rarely open to the public, Lixouri’s Mediterranean-style garden combines an established olive grove with soft flowering natives. Next door, the private garden of Hedgehogs features rambling roses, soft garden paths and cottage plantings.

After lunch, explore the township of Castlemaine at leisure, with its historic ‘Gold Rush’ streetscape, before returning to Hepburn Springs. (BL)

 

TUE 30 OCT / HEPBURN SPRINGS

 

Begin today with a morning at leisure in the town of Daylesford, known for its historic streetscapes, art studios, cosy cafés and boutique stores.

Then head to Lambley Nursery, where a featured range of frost-hardy plants are world renowned for their sustainability and dry climate aptitude. Return to your hotel, stopping en route for a visit to Overwrought Garden Art store, for a wander through their garden filled with local art and metalwork designs. Arrive in the late afternoon in time for optional spa treatments (additional cost). Dinner at a local hotel. (BD)

 

WED 31 OCT / HEPBURN SPRINGS

 

Today, visit the private garden Meadowbank, owned by photographer Simon Griffiths, known for his images in cooking and gardening books by Maggie Beer and Paul Bangay. Travel to Rosebery Hill for a tour of the gardens, which include a quirky topiary, an avenue of poplar trees, rare plants and a century-old Cork Oak.

Explore the Kyneton Botanic Gardens at leisure and then visit the private garden of Scotsman’s Hill, an acre of winding garden sitting atop an old bluestone quarry with views across the countryside. (B)

 

THU 01 NOV / HEPBURN SPRINGS

 

Travel this morning to Stonefields for a tour of this garden led by its creator and famed landscape designer Paul Bangay.

Explore the gardens at The Convent Gallery in Daylesford, with its unique art pieces hidden amongst the greenery. Then, wander through the Wombat Hill Botanic Garden at leisure, established in the 1860s atop Daylesford’s extinct volcano, with views across the Macedon Ranges countryside.

In the evening, celebrate the conclusion of the tour with a farewell dinner with Julie and fellow travellers. (BD)

 

FRI 02 NOV / DEPART MELBOURNE

 

Check out from the hotel and return to Melbourne.

Tour arrangements conclude either upon arrival at Melbourne airport at 11:00 for flights departing from 13:00 onwards, or in Melbourne city at midday. (B)

Atacama to Patagonia: Chile’s Natural World

Atacama to Patagonia: Chile’s Natural World

 

NOTE: CLOSING SOON – 3 PLACES REMAINING

Tour Highlights

 

  • Join John Patrick, horticulturalist, garden designer and presenter on ABC TV’s Gardening Australia, and Dr Rudolf Thomann, a natural scientist, to explore Chile’s unique flora and fauna.
  • Visit public gardens and enjoy privileged access to private gardens that both reflect Chile’s lively contemporary garden culture.
  • Visit the eccentric houses of Chile’s greatest poet, the colourful Pablo Neruda, and hear marvellous stories which inspired Isabel Allende.
  • Explore the rainbow-hued UNESCO World Heritage Listed coastal town of Valparaíso.
  • Visit Santiago’s great Museum of Pre-Columbian Art to explore the rich cultural history of Central and South America, and the Padre LePaige Archaeological Museum with its superb collection from the ancient cultures of the Atacama region.
  • Discover the fascinating geology of the Atacama Desert – a high-altitude 1,200km expanse of dunes, plains, high peaks, and active volcanoes – with visits to Moon Valley in the Salt Mountain Range, the ancient village of Tocanao, Atacama Salt Flat and the famous flamingos of Chaxa Lagoon.
  • Enjoy the awesome natural beauty of Chile’s southern Lake District, visiting the magnificent Parque Nacional Volcán Villarrica which features a glorious mix of lakes and three volcanoes.
    Take a swim in the Termas Geométricas, a Japanese-inspired labyrinth of hot springs hidden in the lush Chilean forest.
  • Learn about the Mapuche community at Curarrehue’s ‘Aldea Intercultural Trawupeyüm’ – enjoy their culture of music, dance, and colourful costumes.
  • Cruise Lago Todos Los Santos to view three stunning but totally different volcanoes – Orsorno, Puntiagudo and Tronador.
  • Spend 2 days in the Torres del Paine National Park, Patagonia – a wilderness of scrubland, ridges, rivers, lakes and lagoons and the eponymous torres (towers) of the Paine Massif; a highlight is our excursion to see the icebergs on Lago Grey.
  • Visit vibrant artists’ markets, and sample distinctive cuisine and enjoy the fine wines for which Chile is famed.

 

21-day Flora & Fauna Tour of Chile
Overnight Santiago (4 nights) • Zapallar (2 nights) • Viña del Mar (2 nights) • San Pedro de Atacama (2 nights) • Santiago (1 night) • Pucón (2 nights) • Puerto Varas (3 nights) • Torres del Paine National Park (3 nights) • Santiago (1 night)

 

Optional Extension to Easter Island
Overnight Hanga Roa (4 nights) • Santiago (1 night)

 

Itinerary

 

Santiago – 4 nights

Day 1: Sunday 14 October, Arrive Santiago

Arrival transfer for participants arriving on the ‘ASA designated’ flight
Short Orientation Walk & Light 2-course dinner
Participants travelling on the ASA ‘designated flight’ are scheduled to arrive into Santiago in the late afternoon. After clearing customs we transfer by private coach to our the Hotel Cumbres Lastarria, located in the Barrio Lastarria. Following check-in and time to freshen up after the long journey, there will be a short orientation walk in the hotel’s historic precinct followed by a light evening meal. (Overnight Santiago) D

 

Day 2: Monday 15 October, Santiago

Morning private garden visits (to be confirmed)
Mercado Central de Santiago
Walking tour of historic Santiago incl. Plaza de Armas, Parque Forestal & Cerro Santa Lucía
Welcome Dinner at a local restaurant
We spend the morning visiting some private gardens selected by our local Chilean expert. These visits will be by special invitation and will introduce you to some of the very latest the country has to offer in garden design that exploit Chile’s unique climate, landscapes and flora.

We return by coach to the city where we tour the Mercado Central and have time at leisure for lunch. Santiago’s fish market is housed in a 19th-century building featuring a beautiful cast-iron roof. Amongst its many stalls are numerous small restaurants serving a variety of fresh Chilean seafood dishes.

After lunch we embark on a walking tour of the city. We begin at the centre of Santiago’s social life, the Plaza de Armas, which is surrounded by heritage buildings, including the Metropolitan Cathedral, the old post office, and the National Historical Museum. We continue past the Palacio de Bellas Artes to the Parque Forestal by the Mapocho River, where we encounter buildings dating from 1520 to the present day. The park was founded as the setting for the Fine Arts Museum. It was designed by George Dubois in a picturesque, naturalistic (English) style with plants imported from Europe and Argentina. Its romantic lake has disappeared but its magnificent six rows of Platanus X hispanica (London Plane) frame views to nearby Cerro San Cristóbel.

We continue to Santa Lucía Hill, so named because Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia took this strategic hill from its native defenders on the well-known female saint’s day. Between 1872 and 1874, it was transformed into a public promenade. In 1936, the German landscape designer Oscar Prager completed a project for the southern slope that descends to the Almeda, Santiago’s main avenue. The gardens, with their ramps and stairs, provide a valuable civic amenity.

We return to our hotel to rest and freshen up before heading to a local restaurant for our welcome dinner. (Overnight Santiago) BD

 

Day 3: Tuesday 16 October, Santiago

Viña Santa Rita: picnic lunch & wine-tasting
Cable Car to Cerro San Cristóbal
Pablo Neruda’s House: ‘Casa Museo La Chascona’
This morning we drive to the Viña Santa Rita, one of Chile’s premier wine estates, located in the verdant valleys of the Maipo wine-making region. We will walk through the vineyards and wine cellars and learn about the processes of traditional Chilean wine production. The winery, covering more than 3,000 hectares, also features the historic ‘Bodega 1′ and ‘Bodega de los 120 patriotas’ which are considered a national treasure. Whilst enjoying the glorious view of the sculpted gardens we will taste some of the vineyard’s wines, which include merlot, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay and cabernet franc. We then drive to Cerro San Cristóbal, the second-highest hill of the city (850m). A ride on the cable car affords magnificent broad panoramas of the city.

Next, we visit ‘La Chascona’, the Santiago home of Chile’s most famous poet, the Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). His house is a triumph of artistic flourishes and includes a very broad, eccentric collection, including works of maritime art. It is located in the historic Bellavista district – home to an important arts community. (Overnight Santiago) BL

 

Day 4: Wednesday 17 October, Santiago

Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino
Barrio Lastarria neighbourhood
Jardín Botánico Chagual
Parque Bicentenario
This morning we visit the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino (Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art), founded by the Chilean architect and antiquities collector Sergio Larraín García-Moreno. The museum displays García-Moreno’s magnificent private collection from the major pre-Columbian Central American, Intermediate / Isthmo-Colombian (Panama etc.), Caribbean, Amazonian and the Andean cultures acquired over the course of nearly 50 years. Housed in the Palacio de la Real Aduana (1805-1807), the museum underwent extensive renovations and reopened in 2014. The collection, which ranges over 10,000 years, includes exhibits of art, sculpture, pottery, textiles and jewellery. Highlights include pieces from the Inca and Aztec empires, and the 7,000-year-old Chinchorro mummies discovered in 1983.

We then transfer to the vibrant Barrio Lastarria, a lovely historic neighbourhood in the city centre, known for its bohemian flavour and diverse cultural activity such as festivals and live performances; it has many theatres, museums, restaurants and bars. The precinct developed around the Church of the True Cross soon after Pedro de Valdivia’s Conquest of Chile. Old houses, recently restored, occupy its winding streets and the Plaza Mulato Gil de Castro.

Following a light lunch, we visit the Chagual Botanical Garden, located in the Parque Metropolitano near the Cerro San Cristóbal. It occupies 84 acres and is still in the early stages of planning and development. The aim is to recreate central Chile’s unique ecosystems featuring special collections of endangered, medicinal and other significant plants such as those with special botanical or economic value. Of particular interest, it will feature plants native to Chile’s ‘Mediterranean’ climatic zone like those of southeastern and southwestern Australia, California and the South African Cape. The Melbourne Botanic Gardens and Kings Park, Perth, have been assisting with advice on this project. The flora of Chile is diverse and spectacular and these gardens are named after the eye-catching chagual (puya chilensis) which is indigenous to the region.

We end the day with a visit to the Parque Bicentenario, a communal city garden with interesting landscape design by Teodoro Fernández L. Architects. The park is located next to ‘Sanhattan’, the popular ironic sobriquet given to Santiago’s ‘high-end’ financial district. Spread over 30 hectares along the eastern bank of the Mapocho River, it includes over 4,000 trees of which more than 1,300 are native species. (Overnight Santiago) BL

 

Zapallar – 2 nights

 

Day 5: Thursday 18 October, Santiago – Parque Nacional La Campana – Zapallar

Parque Nacional La Campana
Time at leisure in Zapallar
This morning we depart Santiago and drive to the Chilean coast. On the way we visit Parque Nacional La Campana which occupies the highest part of Chile’s coastal mountain range (cordillera). Charles Darwin climbed Cerro La Campana (1,800m) in 1845. The park, which features rugged coastal scenery, features the finest remaining stands of Chilean palm (Jubaea chilensis). The palms occur here among typical matorral vegetation, with soap-bark tree (Quillaja saponaria), Lithraea caustica, Adesmia arborea, and others. These palms, which grow to a height of 25 metres, first flower at the age of 60, and can live for 1,000 years. The genus was named after Juba II, a Berber king and botanist. The common name refers to the past use of the sap from the trunk of this palm to produce a fermented beverage. The sap is also boiled down into a syrup and sold locally as miel de palma. Although described somewhat disdainfully by Charles Darwin as a ‘very ugly tree’, many consider the Chilean wine palm J. chilensis to be one of the most impressive palms in the world.

After a picnic lunch we continue on to Zapallar where there will be time at leisure to explore the town before we enjoy a group dinner at a waterfront restaurant. Zapallar is a quaint, elegant seaside resort built along steep hills on a protected horseshoe bay between rugged, steep cliffs and rocky precipices. It offers majestic views and has many historic mansions that now sit side-by-side with contemporary homes. A Mediterranean micro-climate allows the cultivation of the many attractive gardens that have always adorned the town. (Overnight Zapallar) BLD

 

Day 6: Friday 19 October, Zapallar – Los Vilos – Zapallar

Morning private garden visit (to be confirmed)
Reserva Ecologica El Puquén, Los Molles
Following a visit to a private garden (arrangements to be confirmed), we explore the dramatic coastal El Puquén Ecological Reserve, with rugged cliffs, unusual geological formations including a volcanic cave, ancient middens, fossil zones and an interesting endemic flora (lúcumo and wild papayo). The park is home to interesting fauna, including chilla foxes (South American grey foxes), quiques (a yellow-grey animal with back spots, similar to a skunk), eagles, harmless snakes and the cururo – a species of small endemic rodent that lives underground. (Overnight Zapallar) BLD

 

Viña del Mar – 2 nights

 

Day 7: Saturday 20 October, Zapallar – Papudo – Quillota – Viña del Mar

Private garden visits (arrangements to be confirmed)
This morning we plan to visit private gardens in the area outside of Zapallar. In the afternoon we continue our journey to the resort beach town of Viña del Mar, known popularly as ‘The Garden City’. (Overnight Viña del Mar) BL

 

Day 8: Sunday 21 October, Viña del Mar – Valparaíso – Viña del Mar

Funicular ‘El Peral’ ride to Conception Hill, Valparaíso
Cerro Alegre and merchant houses, Valparaíso
House museum of poet Pablo Neruda, ‘La Sebastiana’, Valparaíso
National Botanical Garden (‘Saltpeter Park’), Viña del Mar (to be confirmed)
Our first visit this morning is to colonial Valparaíso, one of Chile’s most captivating cities, noted for its colourful history as a major port and its rich artistic, literary and political traditions. It is also physically very colourful, with extraordinary brightly painted houses crammed up against each other along the city’s steep slopes. The city’s fascinating blend of past and present has caused it to be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. It looks out across a wide bay with the upper parts of the town reached by stairs, narrow streets and funicular railways.

We ride the funicular ‘El Peral’ up Conception Hill which commands excellent views to the port. We then visit the port itself and the city centre and stroll through some of the avenues leading to the scenic point, Cerro Alegre. The dwellings here were once owned by foreign merchants who began building around 1840.

After time at leisure for lunch we continue to another former home of the poet Pablo Neruda, ‘La Sebastiana’. It is shaped like the hull of a ship and its contents reflect Neruda’s love of the sea. From the poet’s desk there is a spectacular view of the Pacific; he is thought to have written many poems about the natural world seated here.

We next drive to the garden originally known as ‘Saltpeter Park’ at Viña del Mar. This oasis, covering an area of 395 hectares with more than 3,000 species of flora, was originally commissioned by nitrate baron Pascual Baburizza, and was created by the French landscape gardener George Dubois. The park was donated to the Nitrate and Iodine Company so as to assure its survival. In 1951 this corporation donated the park to the Chilean State; its name was changed to ‘National Botanical Garden’. It serves both an educational and scientific purpose, and is an excellent place to go walking, thanks to its stony paths, ponds and woodlands. Highlights of the garden include one of the few documented collections of the extinct Toromiro of Easter Island (Sophora Toromiro), a collection of plants from the Juan Fernandez archipelago, a Cactarium with 60 Chilean species, and collections of Chilean Myrtaceae, ‘bosque valdiviano‘ (Valdivian forest) plants, medicinal plants and fuchsias. (Overnight Viña del Mar) B

 

San Pedro de Atacama – 2 nights

 

Day 9: Monday 22 October, Viña del Mar – Santiago – Calama – San Pedro de Atacama

Morning flight from Santiago to Calama
Parque para la Preservación de la Memoria Histórica de Calama
Valle de la Luna & Cordillera de la Sal, Reserva Nacional Los Flamencos
This morning we drive back to Santiago and board a flight to Calama, which marks the northern end of the Atacama Desert. From here we drive 103 kilometres southeast to San Pedro de Atacama which will be our base from which to explore the desert. En route we pass the memorial dedicated to victims of human rights violations. Students, communists, socialists, union members, indigenous people—ideological threats to Augusto Pinochet’s vision of fascism and free market economics, were arrested, murdered and thrown into mass graves throughout the country. The murdered of Chile were buried in the Atacama Desert, for example, during what was known as the Caravan of Death of 1973. The Pinochet regime’s depredations inspired Sting’s famous protest song They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo: 1987), referring to mourning Chilean women (arpilleristas) who dance the Cueca, Chile’s national dance, carrying photographs of their disappeared loved ones.  (Watch on Youtube)

In the afternoon we drive to the Valle de la Luna (‘Moon Valley’). Its extraordinary landscape of strange rock formations is part of the protected nature sanctuary, Reserva Nacional Los Flamencos, in the Salt Mountain Range. The valley forms a depression surrounded by jagged spines of salt-encrusted hills, with an immense sand dune running between two ridges, resulting in unbelievable moon-like scenery. We also view the canyon and small dunes of the Cordillera de la Sal (‘Salt Mountain Range’). (Overnight San Pedro de Atacama) BD

 

Day 10: Tuesday 23 October, San Pedro de Atacama

Agro-ecological tour of Toconao village
Quebrada de Jeréz
Salara de Atacama & Flamingos of Laguna Chaxa, Los Flamencos National Reserve
We begin today with an agro-ecological tour of Toconao village, located between the Andes Mountain Range and the Atacama Salt Lake. The horizon here is dominated by very high volcanoes. This little colonial village dates back 12,000 years; there is evidence of 10,000-year-old human presence in the area, making it an area of great historical and archaeological significance. It features picturesque stone houses made from local liparita stone (pumice) extracted from the local quarry, and the old church of San Lucas with its distinctive 18th-century bell tower. The sweet waters of this small oasis support a variety of fruit trees such as Easter pears, plums, quinces and grapes, as well as a wide range of vegetables. The town also features small handicraft workshops whose products include woven products made from alpaca wool. From Toconao we travel to the Jerez Canyon through which runs the Toconao River.

After lunch at a local restaurant we visit the Atacama Salt Flat; at 3,000 sq km, this is one of the world’s largest salt flats. It is also home to the famous flamingos of Chaxa Lagoon, part of the Soncor, a section of the Salar de Atacama in the Los Flamencos National Reserve. In this high, desert landscape, framed by mountains of nearly 6,000 metres, the Soncor provides a breeding ground for a wide variety of species including Chilean and Andean flamingos that use it as an important nesting site, the Andean avocet, the yellow-billed teal, the crested duck, the puna plover and Baird’s sandpiper. Various plant species grow around the edges of the lagoon, such as Distichlis spicata, Ephedra and cachiyuyo (a species of the genus Atriplex), among others. We will observe flamingos in the lagoon in which they feed and breed. (Overnight San Pedro de Atacama) BL

 

Santiago – 1 night

 

Day 11: Wednesday 24 October, San Pedro de Atacama – Calama – Santiago

Church of San Pedro
Padre LePaige Archaeological Museum
Afternoon flight from Calama to Santiago
We spend the morning visiting San Pedro de Atacama, a small isolated oasis town of modest pisé dwellings. The Atacamaño (or Kunza) culture flourished here. The earliest site dates from 9,600 BC, when cave-dwelling hunters arrived from the altiplano. There’s evidence of camelid domestication about 4,800 years ago; the San Pedro culture formed 3,000 years ago, succeeded by the more sophisticated Classic Atacameño culture 2,000 years ago. This reached its peak in the 12th century and ended with the arrival of the Incas around 1450. It was a vital resting place on the northern trade routes through the desert.

San Pedro has a beautiful small white 18th-century colonial church with a picturesque bell tower. The church is surprisingly long, with rustic vaulting of cactus wood slats and algarrobo beams bound with leather. Inside, naïve statues of saints clothed in fine satins stand on the reredos.

To the northeast of the plaza lies the modern Padre LePaige Archaeological Museum that holds superb exhibits from the Inca and other periods in the region’s pre-Columbian history. Father Gustave LePaige (1903-80) was a Belgian Jesuit priest who came to Chile in 1952. He was based in San Pedro from 1955 until his death, dedicating himself to building this archaeological collection; we shall enjoy a commentary on these exhibits by a local archaeologist. The Atacaman Desert is so arid that most artefacts are notably well-preserved. Highlights include the treasury of beaten gold bands dating from 500-900 AD, red and black ceramics of the Classic Atacameño culture, Inca ceramics with images of the sun, textiles and various mummies.

In the late morning we return to Calama for an early light lunch before taking our flight to Santiago. (Overnight Santiago) BL

 

Pucón – 2 nights

 

Day 12: Thursday 25 October, Santiago – Temuco – Curarrehue – Pucón

Morning flight from Santiago to Temuco
Mapuche community & Aldea Intercultural Trawupeyüm, Curarrehue
Private gardens of Hotel Antumalal
This morning we fly south to Temuco, the capital of the Araucanía Region, in Chile’s very beautiful Lakes District.

On arrival we drive to the Mapuche community in the town of Cuerarrehue, which is surrounded by high, sharp peaks. The Mapuche are a group of indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, including parts of Patagonia. Mapuche is a collective term describing a wide-ranging ethnicity composed of various groups who shared a common social, religious and economic structure, and a common linguistic heritage as Mapudungun speakers. Today this group makes up over 80% of the indigenous peoples in Chile; their culture is documented as early as 600 BC.

We shall visit the museum and cultural centre, ‘Aldea Intercultural Trawupeyüm’, which presents Mapuche culture and that of the community of Curarrehue. The museum is housed in a modern interpretation of a mountain ruka, a traditional circular Mapuche dwelling oriented to the east. It includes displays of handicrafts, Mapuche cooking and a program of experimental music.

While in Curarrehue we also enjoy a traditional lunch, which usually includes famous sopaipillas (fried pastry) served with special homemade pebre (a sauce of onion, tomato, garlic and herbs).

After lunch we continue to Pucón where we visit the private gardens of Hotel Antumalal. Designed by the Chilean architect Jorge Elton in the 40s, and influenced by the Bauhaus style, it is considered one of the most famous hotels of the Lakes District. It hosted Queen Elizabeth on her tour of Chile in 1968. The gardens, spread over 5 hectares, offer panoramic views of Lake Villarrica and include five waterfalls with natural volcanic rock pools, a vegetable garden and an array of native vegetation.

In the early evening we arrive at the Villarrica Park Lake Hotel, where we shall be based for two nights. (Overnight Pucón) BLD

 

Day 13: Friday 26 October, Pucón

Parque Nacional Volcán Villarrica
Termas Geométricas: time to relax and enjoy a swim in the thermal pools
We spend the day visiting the magnificent Parque Nacional Villarrica, witnessing the stunning natural beauty of Chile’s southern Lake District. The park, which features a glorious mix of lakes and three volcanoes (Villarrica, Quetrupillánd and Lanín), includes a number of very good walking trails, which lead through the forest, meandering past alpine lakes and deep canyons. The park is also home to the rare Araucaria araucana (monkey puzzle tree), a protected species, of which specimens may live for over 1,000 years and takes five centuries just to reach maturity. We shall visit the south side of the Villarrica volcano which features a dense forest of these trees.

We end the day with a visit to the Termas Geométricas, a Japanese-inspired labyrinth of hot springs hidden in the lush Chilean forest. Suspended over a flowing stream, a maze of red planks winding through the forest, lead to the various pools. There are 17 pools in total, each fed directly from a natural hot spring via wooden pipes. Next to each pool is a small hut/changing room made of the same redwood as the paths. Each hut has grass planted on the roof, giving the whole facility a timeless feel, almost as if they are some extension of the natural backdrop. The complex rests at the bottom of a canyon, and mists rise from the warm waters in a nearly constant fog. Between the Japanese-styled architecture and the Chilean nature, few places in the world can claim quite such a perfect harmony of nature and design. There will be ample time to relax and enjoy a swim in the thermal pools. (Overnight Pucón) BL

 

Puerto Varas – 3 nights

 

Day 14: Saturday 27 October, Pucon – Valdivia – Puerto Varas

Valdivia city tour
Calle-Calle River Cruise: Wetlands of the Carlos Andwandter Nature Sanctuary, San Sebastián de la Cruz Fort/Isla Mancera
Today we visit one of Chile’s most beautiful historic cities, Valdivia, founded by the Spanish conquistador Don Pedro de Valdivia (1497-1553) in 1522. This southern city was of great strategic significance to the Spanish Empire. Its proximity to the Strait of Magellan made it a mandatory shelter on the route to meet the Peruvian viceroyalty. It was also rich in gold and timber and located on the largest navigable river network in the country. The Calle-Calle, Cau Cau, Cruces and Valdivia Rivers which run through this river port invest it with particular charm.

We shall tour the city, visiting the river market and the Torreón del Canelo, a watchtower used by the Spanish as protection against the Mapuches and pirates. It was built in the 17th century and restored by Ambrosio O´Higgins in the 18th century. Many of Valdivia’s houses are in German styles, built by migrants. We shall see San Francisco Church, the Cathedral and the Plaza de la República, with a giant arbour under which citizens enjoy the shade.

We also visit Teja Island, where we see the Universidad Austral de Chile campus and Valdivia’s Botanical Gardens, which display a rich variety of native and exotic species, including panaceas, cedars, ‘mediterráneos’, coihues, cypresses, laurel, tree ferns, poplars, acacias and plants from the Magellan and Valdivian forests. We continue to the traditional Kunstmann Brewery where we can taste the most diverse kinds of famous Valdivian hand-brewed beers.

We shall then embark on a cruise along the Calle-Calle River where we will encounter sea lions and view a number of Spanish Forts; Niebla, Fuerte Corral, and Fuerte Mancera. We shall journey through the wetlands of Carlos Andwandter Nature Sanctuary. This area was declared a Nature Sanctuary in 1981, and in the same year it was included in the ‘Convention on Wetlands of International Importance’. It was formed by an earthquake which submerged the area in 1960; agricultural land subsided to a depth of 1 to 2 metres. Subsequently it was colonised by vegetation, which made a home for aquatic fauna, especially birds. There are at present 119 species living in the wetland and adjoining areas. Amongst others there are black-necked swans, coots, coscoroba swans, marsh crows, coypu and river otters.

We shall also view the San Sebastián de la Cruz Fort/Isla Mancera, one of the seventeen Spanish fortresses built in the area from the 17th century, as well as the San Pedro de Alcántara Fort and the Corral Fort.

Mid-afternoon we continue our drive to Puerto Varas where we shall be based for three nights. Our hotel is within walking distance of the beach and offers panoramic views of Llanquihue Lake and the Osorno and Calbuco volcanoes. (Overnight Puerto Varas) BLD

 

Day 15: Sunday 28 October, Puerto Varas – Frutillar – Puerto Varas

German Colonial Museum, Frutillar
Amphitheatre (Teatro del Lago), Frutillar
Time at leisure
Today we drive south to the lakeside resort of Frutillar, located on Llanquihue Lake near the Osorno Volcano. This was Chile’s first German migrant town. Frutillar is famous for its music festival ‘Las Semanas Musicales de Frutillar’ that came into being in 1968. A particular characteristic of Frutillar is its houses German-style houses. There are beautiful gardens in the town. We shall visit the German Colonial Museum and the amphitheatre (Teatro del Lago) where the famous music festival is held.

We shall return to the hotel by mid-afternoon to enjoy some time at leisure. (Overnight Puerto Varas) B

 

Day 16: Monday 29 October, Puerto Varas – Peulla (island on Todos los Santos Lake) – Puerto Varas

Petrohué Falls, Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park
Catamaran Cruise from Petrohué to Peulla on Lago Todos Los Santos
La Villa Ecológica de Peulla
Today we visit the Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park which not only contains the loveliest of Chile’s lakes, but also three stunning but totally different volcanoes – Osorno, Puntiagudo and Tronador. With up to 4 metres of annual precipitation, the park is covered with dense evergreen forrest, notably coihue. Lago Todos Los Santos is surrounded with olivine, coihue and other trees.

We depart early in the morning by bus from Puerto Varas to Petrohué, enjoying views of the Osorno Volcano, which dominates the region. On arrival we make a brief visit to the Petrohué Falls, which flow down volcanic rock chutes etched by lava. From Petrohué we board a catamaran for a 2-hour cruise across the green waters of Lago Todos Los Santos to the ecological town of Peulla. If visibility allows, we shall see the snow-capped Osorno Volcano, the Puntiaguado hill and the Tronador (extinct volcano) from our boat.

On arrival at Peulla we visit the Ecological Villa which is a paradise for nature enthusiasts and lunch at the Peulla Hotel. In the mid-afternoon we return to Puerto Varas. (Overnight Puerto Varas) BL

 

Torres del Paine – 3 nights

 

Day 17: Tuesday 30 October, Puerto Varas – Puerto Montt – Punta Arenas – Puerto Natales – Torres del Paine

Flight from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas
Museo Nao Viktoria
Today we drive to Puerto Montt to take our flight south to Punta Arenas located in the heart of Chilean Patagonia. From here we drive north to the vast Torres del Paine National Park.

En route we visit the Museo Nao Viktoria, which contains replicas of the ships that contributed to the discovery and colonisation of the area or have a special and historic heritage significance for the Magallanes Region of Chile. The replicas were built using traditional shipbuilding techniques. A highlight of the collection is the full-size replicas of historic ships which include the Nao Victoria, James Caird, Schooner Ancud and HMS Beagle. HMS Beagle, a British Navy brig-sloop, was converted into an exploration vessel. The most famous of her three voyages was the second (1831-1836) under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy (1805-1865). On board was the young Charles Darwin. (Overnight Torres del Paine National Park) BLD

 

Day 18: Wednesday 31 October, Torres del Paine National Park

Excursion to the National Park’s Waterfalls and Lookout points
Torres del Paine National Park (Parque Nacional Torres del Paine) encompasses the great Cordillera del Paine, glaciers, lakes and rivers. The park, which lies in a transition zone between the Magellanic subpolar forests and the Patagonian Steppes, is located 112 kilometres north of Puerto Natales and 312 kilometres north of Punta Arenas. Paine means ‘blue’ in the native Tehuelche (Aonikenk) language and is pronounced PIE-na. Out of the grasslands of the Patagonian Steppe, with its herds of grazing guanacos (which are akin to llamas), soar the distinctive torres (towers) – three grey granite peaks of the Paine mountain range or Paine Massif which form part of the tapering spine of the Andes. They rise up to 2,800m above sea level, and are joined by the Cuernos del Paine. The Park’s well-known lakes include Grey, Pehoé, Nordenskiöld, and Sarmiento. Its glaciers, including Grey, Pingo and Tyndall, belong to the Southern Patagonia Ice Field.

Today’s excursion will begin at the Forestry Corporation Visitors Centre to gain an overview of this biosphere reserve. We then visit the Salto Grande where a short walk takes us to the imposing waterfall, and where we can view the Paine Grande Mountain. We also visit the Lago Nordenskjöld viewpoint, the Amarga Lagoon and the Paine River Falls, as well as encountering panoramic views of the Torres del Paine. Today’s lunch will be a picnic taken at Laguna Azul. (Overnight Torres del Paine National Park) BLD

 

Note: Today you have the option of taking a more strenuous trek through the Torres del Paine National Park, with the arrangements made by the hotel.

Day 19: Thursday 1 November, Torres del Paine National Park

Walk along Grey beach with views of the iceberg
Boat Excursion across Lago Grey to the Grey Glacier
The focus of today is a visit to the Grey Glacier, one of Torres del Paine’s most spectacular glaciers, and Lago Grey that it fills, one of its most beautiful lakes. On the approach to Lago Grey we cross a rickety bridge over a fast-flowing stream, then journey through dense forest. We then emerge from the trees onto what looks like a shingle beach overlooking the lake itself. Lago Grey is bordered by a moraine, the result of debris deposited by the glacier, and an iceberg graveyard. If the weather is fine, we shall take a 3-hour boat trip out on the lake. As we travel across the water, Glacier Grey comes into view in the distance. A wide, bluish wall sandwiched between bare rock plateaux, its façade is a mass of jagged, eroding ice. (Overnight Torres del Paine National Park) BLD

 

Santiago – 1 night

 

Day 20: Friday 2 November, Torres del Paine National Park – Punta Arenas – Santiago

Manantiales Estancia
‘Asado patagonico’, Patagonian lamb BBQ
Afternoon flight from Punta Arenas to Santiago
Today we drive back to Punta Arenas. En route we visit a traditional Patagonian estancia (ranch) where the owner will explain the traditions of Patagonian sheep farming and horse breeding. We also enjoy a traditional Patagonian lamb asado (barbecue) before taking an afternoon flight back to Santiago. (Overnight Santiago) BL

 

Day 21: Saturday 3 November, Depart Santiago

Departure transfer for travellers taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight
Our program finishes in Santiago. Participants travelling on the ‘designated flight’ will be transferred to the airport to take our flight home to Australia. Participants electing to travel on the ASA optional extension program to Easter Island will also be transferred to the airport to commence their program B

 

Optional Extension Program to Easter Island: Hanga Roa, Easter Island – 4 nights

 

Day 1: Saturday 3 November, Santiago – Hanga Roa, Easter Island

Morning flight to Easter Island
This morning you will be transferred to the airport to take the flight to Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, to use its Polynesian name. The rich and unique culture and archaeology of this island led to it being named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995, and much of the island is now a national park.

Rapa Nui is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world – the nearest inhabited land is Pitcairn Island located over 2,000 kilometres away! Rapa Nui was settled by Polynesian people between 700 and 1100 AD. A thriving culture developed on the island and we will see much evidence of this in the monumental statues called moai, that are found throughout the island. It is estimated that this small island had a population of up to 15,000 people, but this thriving civilisation was greatly weakened by the gradual deforestation of the island and extinction of natural resources, brought about by human activity, overpopulation and the introduction of the Polynesian rat. When Dutch explorers first encountered the island on Easter Day in 1722 the population was approximately 3,000 people, but this dropped to just 111 in 1877, as the indigenous people struggled to survive introduced European diseases such as typhoid and smallpox, and brutal raids by Peruvian slavers. Today Rapa Nui’s population is 6,000 residents, of which 60% are of indigenous descent.

On arrival in the island at 1325hrs you will be transferred to the hotel for check in and lunch. We then take a short orientation tour of the island’s only town, Hanga Roa, then visit Museo Antropológico Sebastian Englert, a fascinating museum named after the Bavarian missionary priest who lived here from 1935 until his death in 1969. Fr Sebastian was a keen scholar and he devoted himself to the language, oral traditions and archaeology of the Rapa Nui indigenous culture.

Late this afternoon we drive to Ahu Tahai, an archaeological site a short distance from the town where we shall enjoy our first encounter with the island’s famous moai at sunset.

This site was restored in 1974 and comprises three platforms (ahu) with moai. The statues of the ahu Ko Te Riku have restored eyes and headdresses (pukaos) and give a vivid impression of the splendid and imposing nature of the Rapa Nui culture. (Overnight Hanga Roa) B

 

Day 2: Sunday 4 November, Easter Island

Ahu Vaihu
Rano Raraku
Ahu Tongariki
Ahu Te Pito Kura
This morning we first visit Vaihu where we will find eight moai lying face down in the same position they were left when they were deliberately toppled around the time of European discovery of the island. The decimation of the population saw the loss of much of the island’s cultural heritage, and the reason for the decline of the indigenous culture in the century before European arrival is an area of debate. It is believed that the moai are manifestations of a powerful ancestor cult and the means by which the living could communicate with the dead. In the later pre-European decades, the statue building practice gave way to the Bird Man Cult where the medium to communicate with the ancestors was a human chosen through competition. It is believed that is was during this phase that the moai were deliberately toppled. However, the obvious care by which the statues were lowered face-down to the ground has led scholars to suggest another theory, that the statues were lowered so they could not witness the struggles of the Rapa Nui in the 18th century.

We next travel to Rano Raraku, a volcanic crater within the Rano Raraku National Park that supplied almost all the stone for the island’s moai. Within the quarry are a number of incomplete statues. It appears that some of these were never intended to the separated from the rock from which they are carved, being located in inaccessible areas high on the outside of the crater walls, or much larger than any moai found that had been transported away. There are also several standing statues at Rano Raraku that were not deliberately pushed over. They do not have hollowed out eyes or headdresses and they are partially buried to the shoulders in the spoil from the quarry.

Our route continues to two further ahu – Ahu Tongariki, a 220-metre-long platform with 15 majestic statues with their backs to the sea, and Ahu Te Pito Kura, a complex with a huge toppled moai and nearby the sacred magnetic stone known as ‘Tita’a hanga ‘o te henua’, or ‘navel of light’.

In the mid-afternoon we return to Hanga Roa where the rest of the afternoon is at leisure.

Return to hotel in mid-afternoon, and the rest of the day is at leisure. (Overnight Hanga Roa) BL

 

Day 3: Monday 5 November, Easter Island

Ahu Akivi
Puna Pau
Afternoon at Leisure
Evening meal with demonstration of traditional dances
This morning we visit Ahu Akivi, a platform with 7 identical moai restored to their standing position. Unlike other examples we have seen, these statues face outwards towards the ocean, although the site is located inland. The site served as a celestial observatory and dates to the 16th century. During the Spring Equinox they directly face sunset, and during the Autumn Equinox they have their backs to the sunrise.

We then visit Puna Pau, the small volcanic crater where the red scoria stone used for the moai headdress were quarried.

We return to the hotel for an afternoon at leisure before we enjoy a group evening meal with a demonstration of traditional Rapa Nui dances. (Overnight Hanga Roa) BD

 

Day 4: Tuesday 6 November

Rano Kau extinct volcano
Orongo Ceremonial Village
Ahu Vinapu
Cave of Ana Kai Tangata petroglyphs
Our first stop this morning is the extinct volcano of Rano Kau, which forms the southwestern headland of the island. The crater lake is one of just three natural water sources on the island, and the crater, which is a mile in diameter, has its own microclimate. On the crater’s edge we find the ruined ceremonial village of Orongo, containing a collection of low, windowless round-walled buildings that were restored to their current state in the 1970s. Orongo was a centre of the birdman cult. Competitors had to make the dangerous crossing through the surf to the nearby islet of Motu Nui and find an egg of the migratory sooty tern, then climb up the steep, jagged cliff-face to Orongo. The site has many petroglyphs with representations of tangata manu (birdmen).

After a visit to Ahu Vinapu where we find one of the larger moai on the island in a platform that faces towards the sunrise on the winter solstice, we continue to the cave of Ana Kai Tangata. Being a volcanic island there are many lava tubes and cave networks and Ana Kai Tangata is one of the most accessible. Here we find splendid rock with paintings in red white and black depicting the sooty tern and also boats, including European vessels. Some scholars suggest that for the indigenous people of Rapa Nui the island was the whole world and only the migratory birds could come and go. When Europeans arrived in their large ships, the Rapa Nui may have believed they were messengers from beyond, arriving and disappearing in the ocean like the birds. (Overnight Hanga Roa) B

 

Santiago – 1 night

 

Day 5: Wednesday 7 November, Easter Island – Santiago

Morning at leisure
This morning is at leisure. In the early afternoon we transfer to the airport for our flight back to Santiago, arriving at 2140hrs. On arrival in the capital we will be transferred to the hotel. (Overnight Santiago) B

 

Day 6: Thursday 8 November, Depart Santiago

Departure transfer for travellers taking the ASA ‘designated’ flight
Our tour ends in Santiago. Participants travelling on the designated group flight will be transferred to the airport. B

 

Let’s Visit Spain and Morocco

Let’s Visit Spain and Morocco with Kim Woods Rabbidge

 

Itinerary

 

Day 1 Mon 16 April Arrive Barcelona

Arrive at Barcelona, group transfer to your hotel in the heart of the city (Individual transfers can be arranged on request). The remainder of the day is at leisure.

 

Day 2 Tue 17 April Barcelona

Day excursion in Costa Brava. We explore the terraced, botanical gardens of Cap Roig, extending from the castle to the sea. On the way back, in Lloret de Mar, we visit Santa Clotilde Garden perched on a cliff-top. (B)

 

Day 3 Wed 18 April Barcelona

Enjoy a city tour in Barcelona visiting Gaudi’s amazing Sagrada Familia & the Palau de la Música Catalana. Evening is at leisure. (B)

 

Day 4 Thu 19 April Barcelona-Casablanca-Marrakech

Leave Barcelona this morning on a flight to Casablanca, Morocco. After traveling by air-conditioned coach to Marrakech, our next form of transport will be calèches (horse-drawn carriages) to Marjorelle Gardens where vivid colours contrast with the villa’s bright blue façade. As dusk falls wander through Djemma El Fna square amongst jugglers, story-tellers, snake charmers and acrobats performing beneath the magnificent, illuminated backdrop of the Koutoubia Mosque. (B, D)

 

Day 5 Fri 20 April Marrakech

Morning tour to the Bahia Palace, the Menara Gardens, the Medrasa and souks (market). The Menara gardens, with a backdrop of the ancient Atlas Mountains, were built in the 12th century by the Almohad ruler Abd al-Mu’min. Lunch at Terrasses d’Epices in the heart of the Medina.

After evening drinks at the famous Mamounia Hotel enjoy a lavish Moroccan feast at the renowned Yacout restaurant. (B, L, D)

 

Day 6 Sat 21 April Marrakech-Ourika Valley-Marrakech

Sip refreshing mint tea in the herbal gardens of Ourika Valley. After lunch return to Marrakech via the Saffron Gardens where you’ll discover the processes of saffron production. Be tempted with herbal teas and Moroccan pastries. (B, L, D)

 

Day 7 Sun 22 April Marrakech-Beni Mellal-Fes

Travel to Fez through the Atlas Mountains, lunch on route in Beni Mellal. We’ll pass Berber villages of Imouzer and Ifrane, and arrive in Fes late afternoon. (B, L, D)

 

Day 8 Mon 23 April Fes

Rich in traditional culture, we’ll explore the UNESCO world-heritage listed medinas of Fes, the oldest of Morocco’s Imperial cities, and the country’s symbolic heart. Visit new town, Fes J’did, the old Kasbah des Cherarda, the souqs, the Royal Palace and the Blue Gate.

Lunch at a local restaurant before visiting the famous cobalt blue pottery of Fes and we also learn about colourful, tribal Moroccan carpets. (B, L, D)

 

Day 9 Tue 24 April Fes-Tangier

On route to Tangier we stop at Volubilis, the largest and best preserved Roman ruins in Morocco. Then onto the magnificent Imperial City Meknes where we’ll lunch before continuing to Tangier. (B, L, D)

 

Day 10 Wed 25 April Tangier

This morning learn about this fascinating port city with special visits to the American Legation Museum, followed by lunch at a local restaurant.

You’re free this afternoon to wander into the Kasbah where Betty Hutton (Woolworths Heiress) lived, and soak up the history and exotic tales associated with the Continental Hotel. (B, L, D)

 

Day 11 Thu 26 April Tangier-Algeciras-Ronda

After breakfast we transfer to Tangier Med port. We’ll take a ferry across the Gibraltar Strait entering Spain, through Algeciras Port. Our coach will be waiting to take us to Ronda, where we spend the rest of the afternoon enjoying the atmosphere of this captivating town. (B)

 

Day 12 Fri 27 April Ronda-Granada

This morning we’ll be escorted through Rhonda. We’ll visit the Puente Nuevo, Bullring Square, Casa del Rey Moro and Palacio del Marqués de Salvatierra.

On route to Granada, we’ll visit the beautiful, historical Jardín Botánico de la Concepción in Málaga. (B, D)

 

Day 13 Sat 28 April Granada

With our guide, this morning we’ll explore the world famous Alhambra, described by Moorish poets as ‘a pearl set in emeralds’, and the more recent gardens of the Generalife. Afterwards, we’ll relax over lunch in a local restaurant, then enjoy a leisurely afternoon. (B, L)

 

Day 14 Sun 29 April Granada-Seville

Today we visit Corral del Carbón, then the Royal Chapel of Granada and adjacent Cathedral. After lunch, we’ll depart for Sevilla, where you can either relax, wander, or shop. (B, L)

 

Day 15 Mon 30 April Seville

Walking shoes on for a visit to the Cathedral, and gardens surrounding Alcázar, of Seville, developed by Moorish Muslim kings, and still used as a residence of Spain’s Royal family.

Afterwards, we’ll lunch in a local restaurant. Evening at leisure. (B, L)

 

Day 16 Tue 01 May Seville

Today we take a panoramic tour in Seville: Torre del Oro, Real Maestranza, Expo del 92, Expo del 29, Plaza de España y Parque de María Luisa. Evening is at leisure. (B)

 

Day 17 Wed 02 May Seville-Cordoba

Depart by coach to Cordoba. Enjoy a walking tour of the Patios of the Zona Alcazar Viejo, San Basilio District of Córdoba, including entrance to the Cathedral (former mosque). Evening at leisure. (B, D)

 

Day 18 Thu 03 May Cordoba

Today we will visit the Synagogue, Great Mosque, Alcázar of Córdoba Gardens, Palacio de Viana and Córdoba Patios. Afternoon at leisure. (B)

 

Day 19 Fri 04 May Cordoba-Madrid

Transfer to the train station for the high speed train to Madrid. Check in to your hotel located in the heart of the old city. The reminder of the day at leisure. (B)

 

Day 20 Sat 05 May Madrid-Segovia-Madrid

A full day excursion to UNESCO World Heritage Segovia, a city that demonstrates Roman architectural mastery. Visit the famous Alcázar and La Granja de San Ildefonso to see the baroque palace that was built for Philip V. of Spain and set in gardens in the French formal style with fountains. (B)

 

Day 21 Sun 06 May Madrid

Enjoy a full day city tour in Madrid and visit to the Prado Museum before our farewell dinner. (B, D)

 

Day 22 Mon 07 May Depart Madrid

After breakfast, group transfer to airport (Individual transfers can be arranged on request). (B)

 

Autumn on Monaro

Autumn on Monaro – Art, Gardens and History of the High Country with Trisha Dixon

 

23–27 April 2018 (5 days)

 

Explore the historic homesteads, private gardens and artists’ studios of the Monaro Plateau at the height of its autumnal glory, where art, horticulture and history come together.

 

AT A GLANCE…

• Explore the historic houses and gardens of the Monaro, including Hazeldean Merino Stud, Micalago Station, Curry Flat and Shirley
• Visit the gardens and studio of renowned Australian contemporary artist Imants Tillers
• Enjoy a poignant commemoration of ANZAC Day in Jindabyne
• Extend your experience with a tour to the 2018 Canberra International Music Festival, attending at least six performances of music ranging from established classical works to exciting world premieres

 

ITINERARY

MONDAY 23 APRIL 2018 / ARRIVE CANBERRA

Arrive in Canberra and make your way to the hotel. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your flights and other travel arrangements.
In the evening, join Trisha and fellow travellers for a special welcome dinner. (D)

 

TUE 24 APR / CANBERRA – JINDABYNE

After breakfast, travel south to Micalago Station, a historical pioneer homestead and the location of multiple film sets including My Brilliant Career in 1979, for a guided tour around the garden and a visit to the site where George Lambert painted his iconic The Squatter’s Daughter. After lunch at the estate, continue to Jindabyne in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, our base for the next three nights.
The evening is at leisure. (BL)

 

WED 25 APR / JINDABYNE

In the mid-morning, join Jindabyne locals for a special Anzac Day commemorative service in Banjo Paterson Park, where mounted horsemen and women from the Snowy Mountains honour their ancestors who enrolled in the Light Horse Regiment. Following the service and morning tea at the Community Centre, travel to Wild Brumby distillery to enjoy a lunch of local produce, set amongst sculptured gardens and a working raspberry farm. Then continue to Bullocks Flat for an exploratory walk along historic trails, past the relics of a 1910s steam engine once used for sawmilling and the homestead of Dr. Bullock himself, tracing the Thredbo River.
Return to the hotel for the remainder of the afternoon and evening at leisure. (BL)

 

TUE 26 APR / JINDABYNE AND MONARO

Today, explore three private gardens of historical significance in the Monaro region. Start at Curry Flat, where the late 19th century homestead maintains its original features, situated within a beautifully appointed garden complete with sundial rose garden and reflecting pond.
Continue to Shirley, for lunch within the garden established by one family across three generations. Recently redesigned by leading landscaper Paul Bangay, the garden displays a love of European sensibilities with its formal parterres, expansive lawns, secret gardens, opulent autumn foliage and spectacular lake.
In the afternoon travel to Hazeldean, a property over 150 years old where century-old elms encircle the homestead and create an English-style parkland. Courtyard gardens, traditional plantings, stone terracing and vistas of Monaro Plains all complement this tranquil setting. (BL)

 

FRI 27 APR / JINDABYNE – COOMA – CANBERRA

Check out from the hotel and return to Canberra. En route, visit the studio and garden of contemporary artist Imants Tillers. As one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists, his work reflects a continued interest in the idea of place, landscapes and contemporary culture.
For those departing Canberra today, tour arrangements conclude either upon arrival at Canberra airport at 15:00 for flights departing from 17:00 onwards, or in Canberra city at 15:30.
For those joining our 2018 Canberra International Music Festival tour, tour arrangements commence in central Canberra at 17:00. (B)

 

Singapore and Garden Festival

Singapore and the Singapore Garden Festival 2018

 

Itinerary

 

Day 1 Sat 21 July Arrive in Singapore
Our tour commences from the hotel. A brief orientation of the city once you’ve settled into your hotel. Welcome dinner tonight. (D)

 

Day 2 Sun 22 July Singapore Botanic Garden

Transfer for a top-of-the-world experience as the Singapore Flyer, the World’s Largest Observation Wheel, takes us 165 metres into the sky. With 360-degree views, we’ll get our surroundings into perspective and enjoy panoramic views of Singapore and beyond. Then we visit the beautiful UNESCO World Heritage-listed Singapore Botanic Gardens – a star destination for both travellers and local residents. With a rich history, it is home to an array of botanical attractions and a plant collection highly regarded around the world. We also look at the extraordinary ‘orchid story’ at the National Orchid Garden. Since 1928 the garden has been developing orchid hybrids, which has led to a nationally important industry. We will look at the growing process of one of the world’s great collections. This evening soak in the beautiful experience of music and patterns of dancing light in Garden Rhapsody at Gardens by the Bay. Watch the iconic, towering Supertrees transform as the visual sensory extravaganza brings a touch of magic. (B)

 

Day 3 Mon 23 Jul Fort Canning Park-Hort Park-Little India

We’ll enjoy a short early morning visit to nearby Fort Canning Heritage Tree Trail and historic place, once home to the royalty of Singapore, with WW II sites and magnificent trees, in the heart of the city. Then we head to Hort Park, a 9-hectare site used as an education facility for Singapore gardeners. It has a range of specialised gardens, sales facilities, and educational tours. Afterwards we’ll explore Serangoon Road, Little India’s central strip that boasts a plethora of jewellery shops, traditional Indian tailors, everything-must-go fashion outlets, fresh fruit and veg stalls, Chinese liquor stores, beauty salons, and of course, row upon row of delicious curry houses. (B)

 

Day 4 Tue 24 Jul Gardens by the Bay

Today’s destination, Gardens by the Bay, offers breath-taking waterfront views. The multi-award winning horticultural destination spans 101 hectares of reclaimed land. This extraordinary project, opened 4 years ago, is a complex of outdoor gardens and glasshouses on a massive scale. Advised by the Eden Project in the UK, it covers both tropical and temperate to cool climate specialist gardens. (B)

 

Day 5 Wed 25 Jul Singapore Zoo

Visit Singapore’s award-winning wildlife park to see animals roaming freely in natural habitats. White tigers, pygmy hippos, and even naked mole rats – get up close with the wildlife in the appealing Singapore Zoo. Set in 26-hectares, it is home to over 300 species of mammals, birds and reptiles, and has been providing exciting wildlife experiences to visitors for over 40 years.
Rejuvenate your senses over lunch at Bollywood Veggies in the beautiful Kranji Countryside; then visit Kranji War Memorial that honours the men and women from Britain, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, India, Malaya, the Netherlands and New Zealand who died in the line of duty during World War II. (B, L)

 

Day 6 Thu 26 Jul Singapore Garden Festival

We’ll spend today immersed in the grandeur of the Singapore Garden Festival, one of the world’s much-awaited floral fetes. We’ll be treated to creations from leading international landscape and garden designers, florists and horticulturists, including many familiar names from the Chelsea Flower Show, Philadelphia Flower Show, Floriade (Holland), Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show, and Laman (Malaysia). It is the foremost global garden show in the tropics showcasing, under one roof, creations from the top, award-winning garden and floral designers. Farewell dinner tonight. (B, D)

 

Day 7 Fri 27 Jul Depart Singapore

Tour arrangements finish after breakfast. Make your own way to airport for departure flight. (B)

 

Cultural Landscapes of the Midi-Pyrénées & the Dordogne

Cultural Landscapes of the Midi-Pyrénées & the Dordogne with Adrian Mialet

 

NOTE: CLOSING SOON – SMALL GROUP

Tour Highlights

 

•  This tour, led by Adrian Mialet, travels across the great southern plain between the Pyrénées and the Massif Central, into the heavily wooded highlands of the Auvergne, and down the superb river valleys of the Lot, Tarn and Dordogne.

•  Discover the unique history of the Cathars and their cities and castles in Carcassonne and Albi.

•  Visit some of the grandest pilgrim churches, at Toulouse, Moissac, Conques and Périgueux, built on the great medieval pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela.

•  Explore the Templar and Hospitaller territories and the Commanderie in Sainte-Eulalie de Cernon, the Knights’ headquarters dedicated to the pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem.

•  Tour through one of the most scenic and dramatic regions of France, dominated by the lovely river valleys of the Lot, Tarn and Dordogne.

•  Learn about the unique medieval frontier towns, bastides, such as Cordes-sur-Ciel, Najac, Sarlat and Monpazier.

•  Visit châteaux that were once medieval fortress castles but later became majestic palaces surrounded by fine gardens.

•  Visit Cro-Magnon in the Dordogne, where Homo sapiens was first identified.

•  See the spectacular cave paintings of the Late Stone Age in the caves of Rouffignac, Cougnac, Pech-Merle and newly opened Lascaux IV facsimile.

•  View the large prehistoric sculpted frieze at Abri de Cap Blanc.

•  Amble through the weekly village markets and taste the famous Périgord delicacies (truffle, foie gras).

•  Cruise along the Dordogne River on board replicas of traditional gabares.

•  Enjoy a falconry show at Château des Milandes.

•  Sample award-winning wines and enjoy lunch at Château Carbonneau near Saint-Emilion, a family-run winery with strong New Zealand ties.

 

 

16-day Cultural Tour of the Midi-Pyrénées & the Dordogne

 

Overnight Toulouse (2 nights) • Albi (3 nights) • Conques (1 night) • Saint-Jean-Lespinasse (1 night) • Sarlat (4 nights) • Montignac (3 nights) • Bordeaux (1 night)

 

Toulouse – 2 nights

 

Day 1: Tuesday 11 September, Arrive Toulouse

Orientation Walk

Basilica Saint-Sernin, Toulouse

Our tour commences in Toulouse. Upon arrival, participants on the ASA ‘designated’ flight will be included in the group transfer to our hotel. People who have not taken ASA ‘designated’ flight should meet the group at the Grand Hôtel de l’Opéra situated in the centre of Toulouse.

In the afternoon we shall take an orientation walk in the vicinity of the hotel and visit the great pilgrim church of Saint-Sernin (1075-1096). After the abbey church at Cluny (destroyed during the French Revolution), Saint-Sernin was the largest Romanesque church in France. It was one of the five archetypal pilgrim churches on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, the others being Sainte-Foy at Conques, Saint-Martin at Tours, Saint-Martial de Limoges, and the great cathedral at Santiago. All these churches are aisled basilicas. In each, these aisles run down either side of the nave and around the transepts and semi-circular chevet. From the chevet of each church project chapels that once displayed saints’ relics. The aisles that ran right around the church allowed pilgrims to process through the building to see the relics in these chapels without disrupting services in the chancel. Saint-Sernin was constructed from a richly coloured red brick. Its nave, the longest on the pilgrim route, leads to a crossing topped by a magnificent Gothic tiered tower and spire. (Overnight Toulouse)

 

Day 2: Wednesday 12 September, Toulouse – Carcassonne – Toulouse

Château Comtal, Ramparts & Basilica of St Nazaire and St Celse, Carcassonne

Welcome Dinner

Today we drive southwest to what was once the medieval frontier between the Kingdom of France and the Spanish kingdom of Aragón, to Carcassonne, the walled city we shall visit. Before its integration into the French kingdom by Louis IX, Carcassonne was a stronghold of the Cathars, who were decimated by Simon de Montfort during the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229). Before the Crusade, Carcassonne, like many cities in this region, had been a centre of local power, jealous of its independence from larger hegemonies. Originally a Celtic settlement, then a Roman colonia (Carcasum), it became a Visigothic stronghold (508) that resisted the early Franks, was taken for a time by the Iberian Muslims (725), and had become the seat of a local county that often allied itself either to the counts of Barcelona or Toulouse. Fragments of Carcassonne’s Roman walls still exist, within the magnificent concentric rings of medieval ramparts defended by many towers. Louis IX founded a lower city across the River Aude from the original fortified city (1247), and even after it had lost importance as a bastion against Aragón (when the frontier moved further south) its towers and ramparts made the upper, older, city almost impregnable. During the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Prince destroyed Louis IX’s lower city, but could not take Carcassonne proper (1355).

Despite prosperity during the later Middle Ages as a centre of wool manufacture, Carcassonne slowly declined to provincial obscurity and its walls fell into such ruin that in the 19th century the French government considered dismantling them. Carcassonne’s mayor, the antiquary Jean-Pierre Cros-Mayrevieille, and the writer Prosper Mérimée, France’s first inspector of ancient monuments, protested, and the city was eventually restored in the 1850s and 1860s by the great Neo-Gothic architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Carcassonne’s restoration became a key moment in the growth of French, and therefore world, notions of conservation and preservation. Much of France’s medieval built heritage had either fallen into disrepair or had suffered depredations through countless wars and the French Revolution. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc – who also restored Notre-Dame de Paris and was then working on Saint-Sernin, Toulouse – performed the massive feat of bringing Carcassonne back to its medieval glory. Although he was criticised for giving the Carcassonne’s towers steep conical pinnacles that were uncharacteristic of a southern region without heavy snowfalls, his restoration is nevertheless seen as a masterpiece, albeit with touches of Romantic fantasy.

We shall explore Carcassonne’s ramparts and visit its Château Comtal (Count’s citadel) and the Basilica of St Nazaire and St Celse. There will be time at leisure for lunch and to allow you to further explore the city. Mid-afternoon we return to Toulouse and enjoy a Welcome Dinner. (Overnight Toulouse) BD

 

Albi – 3 nights

 

Day 3: Thursday 13 September, Toulouse – Moissac – Albi

Musée des Augustins, Toulouse

Cloisters of Saint-Pierre, Moissac

The morning in Toulouse will be spent exploring the town centre and visiting the Musée des Augustins. The Musée des Augustins, once a grand old Augustinian priory used as a residence and studio by Viollet-le-Duc when he worked on the restoration of Saint-Sernin, now holds a comprehensive collection of Romanesque and Gothic sculpture from the city’s churches.

In the afternoon we depart for Albi via Moissac, visiting the church of Saint-Pierre (1100-1150), which was once a Cluniac abbey. Moissac boasts a fine trumeau (door jamb) graced by the ethereal elongated figures of St Paul and the Prophet Jeremiah. Although much of the original monastery has been destroyed, its cloister remains. It has an important corpus of sculpted panels and capitals including figures in relief whose monumentality suggests that the artist, who also worked in Saint-Sernin, Toulouse, was inspired by antique sculpture, which was to be found in abundance in Southern France. (Overnight Albi) B

 

Day 4: Friday 14 September, Albi

Cathédrale Sainte-Cécile d’Albi

Musée Toulouse-Lautrec

Les Jardins du Palais de la Berbie

Afternoon at leisure

We spend a full day in Albi, a city of red brick, reminiscent of Siena. It stands on the river Tarn, whose bed provided the clay for these bricks. We visit the Bishop’s palace – the Palais de la Berbie – which has a fine garden and houses the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, as well as Albi’s extraordinary, fortress-cathedral, Sainte-Cécile. The Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, one of the finest museums devoted to a single artist in France, incorporates early paintings by the master and some of his most important images of Parisian life. There is also a collection of his posters and a section devoted to his lithography displaying many of his lithographic stones.

As late as the 12th century, the County of Toulouse was independent of the French crown. Its cities were wealthy and their merchants criticised the corruption of the Church. Many were Cathars, a name derived from the Greek word for ‘pure’. Cathars believed in the strict separation of good and evil in the world. They were divided into two groups: ordinary believers who worked in thriving cities like Albi and Toulouse, and ‘perfecti’ who separated themselves from the world, living lives of exemplary abstinence, which contrasted awkwardly with abuses within the Church. The French crown mounted the Albigensian Crusade (c.1208-1244) to destroy the Cathar ‘heresy’. Its hidden motive was to conquer the independent south and incorporate it into the French realm. The population of Albi was slaughtered and Bishop Bernard de Castanet (1240-1317) constructed the new Cathedral of Sainte-Cécile (1282-1330; porch 1519-1535) using riches confiscated from the Cathars. The building, with huge, smooth defensive walls and curved tower-buttresses (so that stones hurled by siege machines would glance off them) was designed like a fortress to remind the Albigensians of the authority of the Church whose dogmas they had questioned.

The rest of the afternoon will be at leisure to explore this beautiful city for yourself. (Overnight Albi) B

 

Day 5: Saturday 15 September, Albi – Sainte-Eulalie de Cernon – La Cavalerie – La Couvertoirade – Millau Viaduct – Albi

Templar and Hospitaller Circuit in the Larzac

Sainte-Eulalie de Cernon: the headquarters of a local Templar Commanderie

Templar and Hospitaller villages of La Cavalerie and La Couvertoirade

Millau Viaduct (time permitting)

The south of France was enriched by Mediterranean trade and pilgrimage to Santiago, but it was also a highly contested region, where the forces of the French and Spanish kingdoms, local potentates such as the Counts of Toulouse and Carcassonne, and religious groups like the Cathars, all vied for power. Another force in this region was the Knight Templar, originally dedicated to the succour of pilgrims in Jerusalem, which had been transformed during the Crusades into an aristocratic, military order. Many myths have been spun around the Templars, most of which, such as their involvement in occult practices, are apocryphal. They nevertheless constituted a powerful force in medieval Europe, amassing vast wealth that raised the jealousy of kings. The Templars, like the Knights Hospitaller (later Knights of Malta) attracted charitable donations, including vast tracts of land. Among their many activities was banking, and Philip IV (1268-1314), who was heavily indebted to them, had many arrested, tortured to produce false confessions, and burned at the stake as heretics. He also forced Pope Clement V to disband the Order in 1312.

We spend today exploring Templar territories in the Larzac region to the east of Albi, visiting Sainte-Eulalie de Cernon, their regional headquarters (commanderie), and their stunningly picturesque fortified village of La Couvertoirade. Sainte-Eulalie de Cernon occupies a deep valley between ridges of the Larzac. It is the best-preserved Templar commandery in France, having been established by the Order in 1159, and then taken over by the Hospitallers when Philip IV eliminated the Templars. La Couvertoirade, in a wildly beautiful setting, deep in the Larzac on the edge of the Cévennes National Park, was a Templar stronghold until the fall of the Order, when it also was taken over by the Knights Hospitaller who built the village’s curtain wall between 1439 and 1450. This wall still stands, and within it are a church, a small château, and a number of lovely old houses.

We shall also have lunch at a small restaurant in La Cavalerie, another fortified Larzac Templar site, halfway between Sainte-Eulalie de Cernon and La Couvertoirade.

We return to Albi in the late afternoon and, time permitting, make a brief stop to view the Millau Viaduct a cable-stayed road-bridge that spans the valley of the river Tarn. Designed by the French structural engineer Michel Virlogeux and British architect Norman Foster, it is the tallest bridge in the world. (Overnight Albi) BL

 

Conques – 1 night

 

Day 6: Sunday 16 September, Albi – Cordes-sur-Ciel – Najac – Conques

Bastides of Cordes-sur-Ciel & Najac

Today we drive north to the secluded town of Conques through the region of the Aveyron Gorges, visiting beautiful hill-top bastides, Cordes-sur-Ciel and Najac.

Bastides played a vital role in the emergence of France after the Dark Ages and the consolidation of royal power after the Albigensian Crusade. They also figured in the ensuing territorial struggle with the Plantagenets of England, the Hundred Years’ War. A bastide was a fortified village or town, usually of regular plan, in which the rural population was forced to reside so it could be defended as well as exploited by the crown or a feudal lord. Both the Plantagenet and French monarchies built bastides, and one of their later functions was as strongholds in the Hundred Years’ War. Before the advent of these very particular communities, the landscape of this heavily forested, under-populated region had only tiny, scattered, isolated settlements, abbeys or the strongholds of the local nobility. The bastides were therefore the ‘frontier towns’ or ‘colonies’ of the Middle Ages, which tamed the land. Although an ideal bastide has a grid plan centring on an arcaded market square, they in fact took many forms that depended upon topography, microclimate and available building materials.

The plan of Cordes, the very earliest bastide, does not conform to type. Its organic plan accommodated the urban fabric to the steep bluff upon which it was located. Its domestic architecture is distinctive to the region. Originally, its limited agricultural domain would have been surrounded by forest, for Cordes was founded in virgin territory. Its neighbour Najac, a fine, small bastide that occupies a craggy cliff, is dominated by a partly ruined château built by the villagers in 1253 on the orders of Alphonse de Poitiers. Najac’s 13th-century Church Saint-Jean, erected by the local population as a punishment for their Cathar beliefs, overlooks the village, while at the opposite end, the faubourg (medieval suburb or extension to the town) has the typical architecture of many bastides, with timber-framed houses and commercial arcades around an open area. Najac’s houses are so valued that they have been registered in a special catalogue.

After lunchtime in Najac, we turn east again into deep, heavily forested valleys formed by the river Lot to Conques, one of France’s greatest treasures. Tonight we stay in a delightful small hotel occupying a late medieval house next to Conques’ famous church. (Overnight Conques) BD

Saint-Jean-Lespinasse – 1 night

 

Day 7: Monday 17 September, Conques – Figeac – Saint-Jean-Lespinasse

Benedictine Abbey of Sainte-Foy, Conques

Abbey Museum, Conques

Figeac

Conques owes its fame to the Benedictine Abbey of Sainte-Foy (1031-1090) that, despite its isolation, became one of the most famous shrines on the medieval pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela (northern Spain). The church is one of five archetypal pilgrim basilicas, along with Saint-Sernin (Toulouse), Santiago de Compostela, Saint Martin (Tours: destroyed) and Saint-Martial (Limoges). It has a fine east-end with radiating chapels, a narrow, high nave with galleries, and a well-preserved coloured portal depicting the Last Judgement in vividly descriptive detail. The abbey was founded in 866 in a lonely, thickly wooded region of the Dordogne. It became an important station on the pilgrim route to Santiago from Le Puy because of the extraordinary popularity of the saint, martyred in 330 AD, whose relics were brought here in five centuries later. The adolescent girl Sainte Foy, like Saint George, was of obscure origins, but later became so popular that monuments to her were founded throughout Britain, continental Europe and the Near East. Her strange reliquary, fashioned in the form of an enthroned monarch, is the only surviving example of a form popular in the 11th century. It is housed in Conques’ Abbey Museum, which holds one of Europe’s best-preserved collections of medieval pilgrim art.

We shall spend the morning visiting the abbey church and the museum of Conques, and wandering through the small town viewing its lovely small houses.

After lunchtime we shall drive west through the old town of Figeac. Its old houses, many of which have turrets and typical Quercy open-fronted attics, cling to terraces on the steep valley sides above the river Célé. The town has a wonderful ensemble of merchant houses from the Renaissance and, in a medieval courtyard called Place des Ecritures, a large modern sculpture by the American artist, Joseph Kosuth. You will have time to wander through the town and see Figeac’s two churches, Saint-Sauveur and Notre-Dame-du Puy, both of which have Romanesque sections. We continue our journey north to our next accommodation, a small country hotel overlooking the Bave Valley outside the village of Saint-Jean-Lespinasse that is noted for its fine cuisine; we shall dine here tonight. (Overnight Saint-Jean-Lespinasse) BD

 

Sarlat – 4 nights

 

Day 8: Tuesday 18 September, Saint-Jean-Lespinasse – Montal – Autoire – Loubressac – Carennac – Sarlat

Château de Montal

Autoire

Loubressac

Carennac Church

Today we explore a château and two villages close to St Céré and then turn west along the valley of the Dordogne. Our route takes us through the heart of an ancient agricultural region with numerous beautiful châteaux, villages and Romanesque pilgrim churches. We begin at the Château de Montal whose powerful towers and picturesque profile give it the aspect of a fortress. Built in 1523-4, it is, however, a Renaissance palace similar to the great châteaux of the Loire, and the rich decoration of its stately façades reflects a political stability unknown earlier, when bastides were used to tame this part of France and when French and English armies fought each other for control of it. Of particular note are Montal’s portrait sculptures of Robert de Balsac, his wife Antoinette de Castelnau, and members of their family that grace the upper storeys of the courtyard façade. Within, the château has a magnificent central staircase and beautiful fittings, such as great ornamental fireplaces. After touring the château and its gardens, we continue our journey, travelling through Autoire, located at the head of the Gorge d’Autoire, a chasm running south from the Dordogne, to the nearby village of Loubressac where we break for a picnic lunch.

Near Loubressac, the Bave meets the Dordogne, whose south bank we follow to Carennac. Here we stop briefly to view the medieval tympanum over the doorway of the church. Carved tympana, often with graphic depictions of the Last Judgement, were a feature of Romanesque churches, presenting the faithful entering the shrine with awesome visions of Christ or terrifying views of eternal punishments meted out to sinners. You will be able to compare Carennac’s Last Judgement with those you have seen at Moissac and Conques, and will see how each has a very different style compared to its counterparts. From here we follow the Dordogne as it winds its way west and continue on to Sarlat-la-Canéda. (Overnight Sarlat) BL

 

Day 9: Wednesday 19 September, Sarlat – Les Eyzies de Tayac – Rouffignac – Sarlat

Musée National de la Préhistoire, Les Eyzies

Abri Pataud, Les Eyzies

Prehistoric cave of Rouffignac

For over a century the Dordogne has been celebrated for its magnificent painted caves from the Late Pleistocine, what archaeologists call Late Paleolithic (40,000-10,000 BC). At this time humans were sufficiently technologically advanced to survive the extreme cold of the Last Ice Age in this region, and to hunt the huge herds of animals that roamed it. For 25,000 years in this region of limestone plateaux and verdant valleys, humans decorated caves with engravings, sculptures and paintings, depicting all kinds of animals in extraordinary, vividly naturalistic detail. Around 10,000 BC the climate ameliorated and the magnificent cave decorations cease, possibly because the great herds of bison, deer and other animals that man had hunted – and depicted – moved further north to new pastures that had been freed from the retreating ice cover.

This morning we visit the Musée National de la Préhistoire at Les Eyzies-de-Tayac situated in a restored château on a terrace overlooking a plane on which vast herds of reindeer and other beasts would have roamed in the Late Stone Age. The château, in fact, is located on the site of a Prehistoric settlement chosen, no doubt, for the excellent view it provided those scanning the plane for game. The museum holds, among other exhibits, an amazing collection of artefacts such as beautifully sculpted reliefs of animals.

Following lunch in Les Eyzies, we visit the excavation site of Abri Pataud, the only prehistoric site in the Dordogne to have been converted into a museum. It is situated 15 metres above the river Vézère at the foot of an imposing cliff that dominates the village of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac.

Our last visit today is Rouffignac, a vast prehistoric cave which includes ten kilometres of galleries, two of which were frequented by Cro-Magnon artists. It’s also exceptional for its more than 150 depictions of mammoths. An electrical train takes us through. This is linear art: animals and signs outlined in magnanese dioxyde, or finely engraved, or finger-drawn where the wall’s surface is soft enough. The simplicity and accuracy of line here reveal the artist’s talent and expertise more in this cave, perhaps, than anywhere else. The Great Ceiling, one kilometre from the entrance, offers the viewer an unforgettable whirl of mammoths, bisons, and ibex. (Overnight Sarlat) B

 

Day 10: Thursday 20 September, Sarlat – Monpazier – Castelnaud-la-Chapelle – Sarlat

Orientation walk of Sarlat-la-Canéda

Bastide town of Monpazier & Thursday Market

Château des Milandes, Castelnaud-la-Chapelle incl. the Falconry Show

This morning we take a leisurely stroll of Sarlat-la-Canéda which will include a visit to the mysterious Lanterne-des-Mortes and the cathedral, and time to view its golden stone buildings. Sarlat-la-Canéda was largely a ruinous town until purposefully restored by the French government in the 20th century to act as a cultural focus for the Périgord-Noir region.

Next, we drive to the bastide of Monpazier, nominated one of ‘plus beaux villages de France’. It is not only the best-preserved bastide in the Dordogne, but is also considered the most typical example of a bastide in the entire south-west of France. King Edward I of England founded Monpazier in 1284 with the help of Pierre de Gontaut, Lord of Biron, and it was only during the reign of King Charles V of France (1366-1380) that it was taken by the French. In 1574 the Huguenot captain, Geoffroi de Vivans, took control of Monpazier and in 1594 it became a centre of the Peasant’s Revolt.

Despite the ravages of the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of Religion, Monpazier has remained remarkably unchanged for 700 years. Monpazier’s urban core is perfectly quadrilateral in overall layout, its symmetrical, gridded plan covering an area of 400 x 220 metres. The town’s grid is crossed by four transverse streets, which divide it into rectangular precincts. Medieval and 17th-century houses surround the central Place des Cornières; originally, all of Monpazier’s houses were exactly the same size and separated from one another by narrow side alleys or androns to prevent the spread of fire. The ground floor of those surrounding the square form a continuous arcade, a feature typical of bastides, also seen in northern Italy and in Spanish cities and towns. Monpazier’s old market hall is intact; its 16th-century timber roof frame is supported by wooden pillars that rest on stone blocks. St Dominique’s Church was built in the 13th century and added to later. Its nave, with ribbed vaults, leads to a polygonal chevet. Monpazier’s 13th-century Chapter House, situated behind the church, once served as the tithe barn for stocking harvest produce requisitioned as taxes. This tithe house, as well as the town’s highly organised plan and characteristic architecture, all speak physically of the fact that bastides were created from scratch as centres of power and commerce by princes.

Our visit to Montpazier is timed for the Thursday market when you will be able to purchase ingredients for a picnic lunch. Walnuts are a local speciality and taste wonderfully fresh. You may wish to try the local walnut bread and tarts!

In the afternoon we visit the Château des Milandes in Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, a turreted 15th-century château, flanked by hundred-year-old magnolia trees. Les Milandes affords one of the best views of the rolling hills and tiled-roof villages of the Dordogne Valley. The château was built in 1489 when Claude de Cardaillac begged her husband, the Lord of Castelnaud, to build her a house that, true to her wishes, has a very grand interior, with beamed ceilings, mullioned windows and stained-glass panels, and huge fireplaces.

Milandes’ modern fame stems from the fact that it became the home of Josephine Baker, a far cry from the slums of St Louis, USA, where at the age of 12 she had lived on the streets. Baker entered Vaudeville at 15, and soon became one of its most popular dancers, and a key player in the ‘Harlem Renaissance’. Baker fled the racism of the USA in 1925, and gained notoriety for her semi-nude performances at the Folies Bergère, becoming one of Europe’s most popular and richest music hall stars. This extraordinarily talented woman then augmented her music hall performances by becoming an important opera singer. During the war, she spied for her adopted country, assisted the Resistance, and earned two of France’s most important military honours, the Croix de Guerre and the Rosette de la Résistance. Charles de Gaulle also made her a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. Baker was a civil rights activist, friend and associate of Martin Luther King Jr, and after his death was asked by his widow to lead the movement. Childless, she adopted 12 orphans from different countries. She bought Château des Milandes in 1947, and lived here with her French husband and adopted children. We shall tour her home, and see a number of memorabilia, including her famous banana skirt.

Milandes accommodates many birds of prey including buzzards, falcons and barn owls. Before touring the château and grounds we shall attend a Birds of Prey Show, presented by two falconers in the gardens in front of the castle. (Overnight Sarlat) B

 

Day 11: Friday 21 September, Sarlat – Grottes de Cougnac – Labastide-Murat – Pech-Merle – Sarlat

Grottes de Cougnac

Lunch at Hotel La Garissade, Labastide-Murat

Centre de Préhistoire du Pech-Merle

This morning we drive to two fascinating caves at the Grottes de Cougnac, one of which is important for its geology and the other for its fine paintings. You will see mammoth, ibex, human figures and three megaloceros (reindeer with huge antlers). Many of the painted forms take advantage of the natural shapes of the cave wall that may possibly even have suggested them. Some of the stalagmites and stalactites in the cave were deliberately broken at the time the paintings were executed. This suggests that the paintings were to be viewed from the other side of the chamber.

After lunch at Hotel La Garissade, a charming restaurant located in the small village of Labastide-Murat, we drive to Pech-Merle, where we visit a marvelous cave, with painted black outlines of aurochs, mammoth and spotted horses. The art here has been assigned to three distinct phases. To the earliest belong images of circles, dots and the outlines of hands; this phase also includes the ‘spotted horses’. The second phase includes figures made by finger-tracings on the ceiling as well as 40 black outline drawings. The last phase includes engravings, the most famous of which is a bear’s head. In the late afternoon we return to Sarlat, where the evening is at leisure. (Overnight Sarlat) BL

 

Condat-sur-Vézère – 3 nights

 

Day 12: Saturday 22 September, Sarlat – Vézac – Beynac-Cazenac – Condat-sur-Vézère

Market Day at Sarlat-la-Canéda

Jardins de Marqueyssac, Vézac

Barge excursion along the Dordogne River

Village of Beynac-Cazenac

Saturday is market day in Sarlat-la-Canéda, which rivals Conques in the beauty of its medieval streetscapes. Our leisurely morning stroll will include participation in the market where you will be able to purchase ingredients for your picnic lunch in the gardens of Marqueyssac.

The Dordogne south of Sarlat-la-Canéda is littered with exquisite châteaux, bastides and churches. Our drive to the Château de Marqueyssac allows us to inspect this landscape more closely. Marqueyssac has extraordinary ‘hanging gardens’ named because of their position on a craggy promontory with breathtaking views over the surrounding valley. The château was founded in the late 17th century and has remained in the family ever since. In the 18th and 19th centuries a vast number of box trees, which lend themselves so well to topiary, were planted. Marqueyssac’s boxwood folly, along with a great variety of oaks, hornbeams, lime trees, Judas trees, viburnum, plantain, elms and cypresses, shares this inimitable setting with vegetable and flower gardens, fine cliff-top bastions, sinuous paths, and a grand allée derived from one family member’s fond memories of Italy.

We next drive to Beynac-Cazenac, a village which has managed to retain its medieval charm. The Château de Beynac, one of the great castles of the Périgord, dominates the north bank of the Dordogne River from a precipitous height and is defended on the north side by double walls. Crouching beneath its limestone cliff is a small village, once the home of poet Paul Eluard. During the Hundred Years’ War, the Dordogne River frequently marked the border between French and English territories: the fortress at Beynac, then in French hands was faced on the opposite bank of the river by the Château de Castelnaud held by the English.

We shall enjoy a cruise along the Dordogne River on board replicas of traditional gabarres (the Dordogne’s traditional flat-bottomed boats), passing some of the valley’s most beautiful castles along the way, and a local guide will provide a commentary on various aspects relating to the river, its history and its environment.

Following some time at leisure in the village of Beynac-Cazenac to wander through its narrow paved streets, we continue to Montignac where we shall reside for the next 3 nights. Montignac is dominated by a tall tower, the vestige of a fortress that was once the home of the counts of Périgord. Until recently a sleepy backwater, Montignac was transformed when the Lascaux caves were discovered. It is now a thriving small town with attractive medieval streets and houses, a 17th-century priory church and a local folk museum. (Overnight Montignac) BD

 

Day 13: Sunday 23 September, Montignac – Thonac – St-Léon-sur-Vézère – Lascaux – Montignac

Château de Losse, Thonac

St-Léon-sur-Vézère

Lascaux Caves IV

We begin this morning with a visit to the Château de Losse. This castle owes its position, inhabited continuously since prehistory, to its strategic command of the valley. In the 13th century a Flemish family, the Loss, fortified the cliff above the river. Like so many French châteaux, it was transformed from a fortress to a country palace during the Renaissance. This was affected by Jean II de Loss who was one of François I’s pages and tutor to Henry IV. We shall visit the elegant Renaissance building and its large formal garden, all with magnificent views of the valley

We then drive along the Vézère Valley up to the picturesque village of St-Léon-sur-Vézère where we shall have a picnic lunch by the river.

In the afternoon we return to Montignac. Here we will visit the recently opened (2016) new facsimile of the world famous painted caves, Lascaux IV, the original having long since been closed to the public. This is the most famous and spectacular of all decorated caves, best-known perhaps for its 600 paintings of aurochs, horses, deer and a variety of signs; there are also almost 1500 engravings in the cave. Although we cannot visit the original, it is important to see this facsimile in order to gauge the quality of this pinnacle of cave art. (Overnight Montignac) BLD

 

Day 14: Monday 24 September, Montignac – Marquay – Eyrignac – St-Amand-de-Coly –Montignac

Abri de Cap Blanc, Marquay

Les Jardins du Manoir d’Eyrignac

Saint-Amand-de-Coly: Fortified Church

This morning we head to the small village of Marquay to explore the Abri du Cap Blanc, a rock shelter that presents a large prehistoric sculpted frieze. Considered to be one of the best examples of Palaeolithic sculpture, the frieze is 13 meters long and includes carvings of horses, bison and deer.

Then we drive through lovely, often dramatic, countryside to Eyrignac, where Patrick Sermadiras de Pouzels de Lile has restored a formal 18th-century garden, a rarity in Périgord. Here, box, hornbeam and yew are clipped with an almost obsessive exactness to produce verdant architectural forms aligned along three vistas. Strong perspectives of sharply formed leafy structures are orchestrated in subtle tonal contrasts – between the fresh green of lawns, the glossy leaves of the box, the slightly translucent foliage of the hornbeam and the matt, almost black needles of the yew.

We enjoy lunch at the gardens’ terrace restaurant before driving to the picturesque village of Saint-Amand-de-Coly, which has an interesting 12th-century fortified church. The small walled village of Saint-Armand-de-Coly grew up around an Augustinian monastery first mentioned in a document of 1048. A monk from the Catalan monastery of Ripoll, later bishop of Vich, who made a journey around the monasteries of Périgord, wrote the 1048 text. He recorded that the monastery had grown up around the tomb of Saint-Armand, a young Limousine noble who came here as a hermit in the middle of the 6th century from the community of Genouillac (Terrasson). Saint Armand preached to the local population, and when he died was made a saint. The day of his death was fixed as 25th June. A small town grew up around the monastery, whose houses like the monastery itself, were constructed of Sarlaise stone, with typical lauze roofs. Little remains of the monastery and the high defensive walls that protected it and the town, but the magnificent early 12th-century fortified church remains. (Overnight Montignac) BLD

 

Bordeaux – 1 night

 

Day 15: Tuesday 25 September, Montignac – Périgueux – Pessac-sur-Dordogne – Bordeaux

Pilgrim cathedral of Saint-Front, Périgueux

Farewell Lunch and wine tasting at Château Carbonneau, Pessac-sur-Dordogne

Today we drive to Bordeaux via one of France’s most important medieval pilgrimage centres, Périgueux. Its Cathedral of Saint-Front, although very heavily restored in the 19th century, nevertheless is particularly interesting for its medieval domes. The use of domes to roof churches in this region resembles that at St Mark’s, Venice. It is typical of the ecclesiastical architecture of the Byzantine Empire rather than Western Europe. Saint-Front is actually composed of two earlier churches, separated by a high medieval bell tower.

We sample wines and eat lunch at one of the region’s wineries, Château Carbonneau, located between Saint-Emilion and Bergerac. Recently awarded International Best of Wine Tourism prize, this is a corner of New Zealand in the Sainte-Foy appellation, which is between Castillon and Bergerac. Now on the third generation of New Zealand owners (with a French husband however), and a New Zealand winemaker, they produce three types of wine: red, rosé and white. The 100-hectare plus estate is also a working farm, with cattle, forest and some beautiful Bernese mountain dogs. (Overnight Bordeaux) BL

 

Day 16: Wednesday 26 September, Bordeaux. Tour Ends.

Airport transfer for participants departing on the ASA ‘designated’ flight

Our tour ends today in Bordeaux. Participants departing on the ASA ‘designated’ flight will be included in the group transfer to Bordeaux airport. Participants wishing to extend their stay in France and Europe are advised to contact ASA for further information. B

 

Klein Bosheuwel Guesthouse

Klein Bosheuwel Guesthouse, Cape Town

 

Klein Bosheuwel is set on Bishopscourt Ridge overlooking the beautiful Constantia Valley near Cape Town, South Africa. The Constantia Valley is a wine-making region and also a cultural and historical centre for Cape Town.

Klein Bosheuwel Guesthouse is a combination of old world charm and luxury with many warm and cosy places to relax in. It is surrounded by a beautiful garden filled with an amazing variety of birdlife, insects, squirrels and many other shy little creatures. You can enjoy walking through our roses, discovering the scented herb patches and vibrant flower beds, There is also an ornamental pond and a sparkling sun-splashed salt water swimming pool.

Start your day with one of our famous breakfasts and then take an easy 5 minute walk to the world-renown Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens – Klein Bosheuwel is the closest guest house to Kirstenbosch and guests receive a free entrance pass.

For a more active adventure, you can take a 2 hour walk to the top of Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain and enjoy spectacular views of Cape Town.

Klein Bosheuwel is only 15 minutes drive from Cape Town’s airport, its buzzing waterfront cafes and restaurants, and beautiful beaches.

Children are welcome at Klein Bosheuwel and they love playing with Feather, the Sheepdog.

 

Klein Bosheuwel
51A Klaassens Road
Bishopscourt
7708
Cape Town

Phone: +27 21 762 2323

Email: kleinbosheuwel@iafrica.com

Great Gardens of Scotland with Genevieve Jacobs

Great Gardens of Scotland
Lowlands, Highlands, Hebrides and Orkneys with Genevieve Jacobs

 

Join garden writer and broadcaster Genevieve Jacobs as she traverses the romantic heartland of Caledonia at the peak of the summer bloom, exploring the gardens of castles and manor houses as well as private and botanical gardens.
Scotland has long drawn travellers from across the world for its natural beauty and valiant history, and nowhere more so than the heart-lifting Highlands, the rugged Hebrides of the west coast and the windswept Orkney Islands reaching out from Scotland’s north-eastern tip. Benefitting from ample rainfall for most of the year, in the summer Scotland’s gardens put on a show second to none for their verdancy and their magnificent castle and highland backdrops.

 

AT A GLANCE…

 

” Explore the gardens of the Duke of Argyll at Inveraray Castle, overflowing with rhododendrons and azaleas
” Visit the 18th century Dumfries House near Glasgow, former residence of the Marquess of Bute, replete with a walled garden and arboretum
” Travel to the water gardens of Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye, and wander through the Himalayan blooms of Arduaine Garden in Argyll
” Stride like a proud Highland laird through the picturesque Brahan Estate and the exotic subtropical garden of Inverewe
” Visit the Orkney Islands, and see how the Orcadians make their windswept islands bloom in the summertime

 

ITINERARY

 

SUNDAY 03 JUNE 2018 / DEPART AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND

Depart Australia or New Zealand on suggested Qantas/Emirates flights to Glasgow. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements.

 

MONDAY 04 JUN / ARRIVE GLASGOW

Arrive in Glasgow in the early afternoon and check in to your hotel. This evening, join Genevieve and your fellow travellers for a welcome dinner. (D)

 

TUE 05 JUN / GLASGOW

Begin the day with an orientation tour of Glasgow, taking in the city’s beautiful Victorian and Art Nouveau architecture including Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover and the adjacent Walled Garden.
After lunch at a local restaurant, explore the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, containing artwork ranging from Rembrandt to Monet, van Gogh and Dalí, as well as the Scottish Colourists and exponents of the Glasgow School. (BL)

 

WED 06 JUN / GLASGOW

After breakfast, depart for Dumfries House in Ayrshire, the former residence of the Marquess of Bute. Enjoy a guided tour of the Palladian manor house, containing fine works of 18th century furniture by the likes of Thomas Chippendale, and stroll through its walled garden. After lunch, explore the grounds of the estate and the recently-created arboretum, containing more than 500 specimens of trees, shrubs and woodland flowers, as well as two lochans (small lochs).
Return to Glasgow and enjoy an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

THU 07 JUN / GLASGOW – LOCH LOMOND

Check out from your hotel and travel to Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute, taking the ferry across the Firth of Clyde. After lunch at Mount Stuart, enjoy a guided tour of the manor and gardens. Built in the Gothic Revival style of the late 19th century, Mount Stuart House was the first home in Scotland fitted with electricity, and its beautiful gardens include a rock garden, kitchen garden and a quaint, secluded ‘Wee Garden’.
In the afternoon, continue to Loch Lomond, including a ferry crossing of the East Kyle of Bute to return to mainland Argyll. A picturesque freshwater loch bestriding the Highland Boundary Fault, Loch Lomond is the largest stretch of fresh water in Great Britain. (BD)

 

FRI 08 JUNE / LOCH LOMOND

After breakfast, travel to Inveraray Castle, the seat of the Dukes of Argyll, and wander through its gardens and ‘policies’ (improved lands). The magnificent 18th century castle overlooks gardens abounding with white, pink and red rhododendrons and azaleas, and containing trees planted by distinguished 19th century visitors such as Queen Victoria, Prime Minister William Gladstone and explorer David Livingstone.
Spend some free time in Inveraray for lunch before visiting Crarae Garden, an exotic garden imitating the style of a remote gorge in the Himalayas. Return to Loch Lomond for dinner. (BD)

 

SAT 09 JUN / IVERARAY – LOCH LOMOND

Check out from your hotel and travel to Arduaine Garden, on a rocky promontory at the confluence of the Sound of Jura and Loch Melfort, where the North Atlantic Drift warms the coastal climate. Begun in 1898 at the height of Scotland’s enthusiasm for exotic flowers, Arduaine Garden contains a wealth of flora from around the world, with a particular emphasis on East Asian and South American plants.
After lunch at a nearby restaurant, continue to Taychreggan for the remainder of the afternoon at leisure before dinner in the evening. (BLD)

 

SUN 10 JUN / TAYCHREGGAN – ISLE OF SKYE

After breakfast, check out from your hotel and drive to Fort William at the southern end of the Great Glen, the 100 km-fault line that cuts through the Scottish Highlands. Enjoy lunch at leisure in Fort William before you travel ‘over the sea to Skye’, the romantic Hebridean isle which has called out to travellers and members of the Scottish diaspora for centuries.
Check in to the hotel on the Isle of Skye, followed by dinner. (BD)

 

MON 11 JUN / ISLE OF SKYE

After breakfast, explore Dunvegan Castle on the northwest coast of Skye, the stout holdfast that has been the seat of Clan MacLeod of MacLeod for some 700 years. Since the 13th century, successive clan chiefs have embellished the site with towers, battlements and apartments as well as walled, round and water gardens.
After free time for lunch at Dunvegan Castle, drive to Armadale Castle on the southeast coast, a ruined 19th castle once inhabited by the MacDonalds and graced with 16 hectares of beautiful gardens and a Museum of the Isles. (BD)

 

TUE 12 JUNE / ISLE OF SKYE – INVERNESS

Check out from your hotel and cross back to the mainland to Attadale Gardens in Wester Ross. Established in the Victorian era, Attadale now contains a Japanese garden, kitchen garden, water gardens, a sunken garden and a geodesic dome filled with ferns. Scattered throughout the gardens is an impressive collection of sculptures.
After lunch, drive to Fort Augustus for a cruise on Loch Ness (weather and monsters permitting!). The largest lake by volume in the British Isles, the black waters of Loch Ness plumb depths as deep as 126 fathoms. Drive to Inverness, capital of the Highlands, for a stay of three nights.(BL)

 

WED 13 JUN / INVERNESS

In the morning, enjoy a guided tour of Cawdor Castle, which traces its origins back to a 15th century keep built by the 6th Thane of Calder. The castle is particularly well known for its gardens, including the 18th century walled garden, 19th century flower garden and 20th century wild garden – appropriately planted at the height of “Flower Power” in the 1960s.
After free time for lunch, spend the rest of the afternoon at leisure in Inverness. (B)

 

TUE 14 JUN / INVERNESS

Strike out for a day trip across Wester Ross, travelling first to Inverewe Gardens situated on the west coast of the Scottish mainland. Benefitting from the temperate influence of the North Atlantic Drift, Inverewe cultivates such diverse flora as New Zealand olearia, Himalayan blue poppies and even the northernmost planting of Australia’s own Wollemi pine.
Enjoy lunch at Inverewe before travelling to Brahan Estate in central Wester Ross. The 1,600-hectare Brahan Estate plays host to birdwatchers, golfers, trout fishers, Highland ramblers and deer stalkers. Return to Inverness and spend an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

FRI 15 JUN / INVERNESS – ORKNEY ISLANDS

Transfer to the airport for a flight across the Pentland Firth to Kirkwall, capital of the Orkney Islands. The Orkneys, an archipelago reaching out north east from the tip of the Scottish mainland, have a distinct culture of their own, embracing their Norse heritage and the windswept beauty of their island home.
On arrival in Kirkwall, visit a local workshop and gallery showcasing traditional Orcadian crafts and knitwear, and after free time for lunch, explore the history of the islands at the Orkney Museum. Check in to your hotel and enjoy dinner in a local restaurant, followed by a special guest talk from one of the Orkneys’ foremost gardeners. (BD)

 

SAT 16 JUN / ORKNEY ISLANDS

Spend a day exploring private gardens around the Orkneys. Begin at Marengo Garden in St Margaret’s Hope on the island of South Ronaldsay, which was once the centre of the islands’ herring fishing industry.
After lunch in St Margaret’s Hope, return to the main island of the Orkneys for a guided tour of the Quoy of Houton, a historic walled garden which looks out over the point where the Scapa Flow meets the Bring Deeps. The Quoy of Houton is one of the Orkneys’ most elegant gardens, and in 2017 was awarded ‘Best Challenging Garden’ in the Gardeners’ World Garden of the Year competition.
In nearby Orphir, visit Quarry Fields, a hillside garden boasting a wonderful collection of hostas and spectacular views over to the island of Hoy.(BL)

 

SUN 17 JUN / ORKNEY ISLANDS

In the morning, visit Sternwood Garden and the Finstown Community Garden, which display delightful candelabra primulas and roses protected by a shelter belt. After free time for lunch in the charming village of Finstown, continue to Birsay on the northwest coast of the main island for a guided tour of Annie’s Place. Annie’s Place is a tiny garden situated near the beach and the frigid Norwegian Sea, but through the clever use of annuals the owners manage to create a beautiful summer garden in an otherwise hostile environment.
This evening, enjoy a special farewell dinner in the capital, Kirkwall, with Genevieve and fellow travellers. (BLD)

 

MON 18 JUN / ORKNEY ISLANDS – GLASGOW – DEPART GLASGOW

Transfer to Kirkwall airport for a morning flight to Glasgow.
Tour arrangements conclude on arrival in Glasgow airport.
For those returning to Australia or New Zealand, suggested Qantas/Emirates flights departing from 15:30. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements. (B)

 

 

 

Singapore Garden Festival 2018 with Helen Young

Singapore Garden Festival 2018 with Helen Young

 

Discover the luxuriant glory of the gardens of Singapore, from botanic gardens and nature walks to 21st century urban gardens and the Singapore Garden Festival, the most significant garden show in the tropics.

 

AT A GLANCE…

• Spend two days at Gardens by the Bay and the Singapore Garden Festival, showcasing landscape, balcony and fantasy gardens – and of course a wondrous display of orchids

• Enjoy a luxurious 5-night stay in the 5 star Park Royal Hotel, the ‘Hotel in a Garden’, whose balconies and walkways are given over to verdant gardens planted with palms and other tropical species

• Wander through the 82-hectare Singapore Botanic Gardens and the National Orchid Garden, which boasts a collection of cultivars named after visiting world leaders

• Traverse the green belts linking the city’s national parks, oases of calm where Singaporeans come to walk with nature

• Cruise the Singapore River and observe the energetic modern metropolis from the languid calm of a riverboat

 

ITINERARY

FRIDAY 20 JULY 2018 / AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND – SINGAPORE

Suggested mid-morning flights from Australia or New Zealand for mid-afternoon arrivals in Singapore. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements.

On arrival in Singapore, make your way to the hotel and check in. At 19:00, join Helen and fellow travellers for a welcome briefing and dinner. (D)

 

SAT 21 JUL / SINGAPORE

After breakfast, begin your exploration of Singaporean flora with a visit to the Botanic Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage-listed tropical garden founded in 1859. Its extensive National Orchid Garden contains over 1,000 species, including cultivars dedicated to visiting dignitaries like Queen Elizabeth II, Emperor Akihito of Japan and Diana, Princess of Wales.

After free time for lunch, visit Fort Canning Park, once the residence of a 14th century Raja of Singapura, and now a hilltop park. Breathe in the heady aroma of nutmeg and cloves in the Spice Garden, a replica of the one established by Sir Stamford Raffles in the 1820s. Then return to your hotel for a guided tour of the hotel itself! The Park Royal Hotel contains 15,000 square metres of ‘sky gardens’, with palms and other tropical species cascading across four floors.

The evening is at leisure to enjoy the energy of Singapore on a Saturday night. (B)

 

SUN 22 JUL / SINGAPORE

Spend the day exploring the diversity of gardening in Singapore. Begin with a guided nature walk in Hort Park on Singapore’s Southern Ridges, which is connected to a network of other parks in the area by a system of bridges and raised walkways.

Continue to the Natural History Museum via the National University of Singapore.

In the afternoon, explore some of the ‘urban greening’ of Singapore with a walking tour of the horizontal and vertical gardens of the central city. Part of a concerted effort to bring nature into the heart of Singaporeans’ working and domestic lives, in recent years the city has seen luxuriant growth in the number of ‘garden walls’ and ‘garden roofs’ gracing everything from carparks to museums, malls and government ministries.

Return to the hotel in the late afternoon for an evening at leisure. Suggested dinner in the open-air hawker markets of Chinatown. (BL)

 

MON 23 JUL / SINGAPORE

Enjoy a full-day visit to the Singapore Garden Festival, located at Gardens by the Bay. The festival, now in its seventh iteration, is the world’s premier tropical garden show, exhibiting more than 400,000 plant specimens. Featuring landscape gardens, fantasy gardens, balcony gardens and more, the festival displays the best of Singaporean and international garden design. No floral exhibition in Singapore would be complete without a riotous display of the island’s most beloved blossom, and the Orchid Extravaganza sings a paean to Singapore’s national flower. Enjoy free time for lunch at the festival.
(Singapore Garden Festival dates subject to confirmation.)

Return to the hotel in the late afternoon, and in the evening, enjoy a leisurely cruise on the Singapore River followed by dinner at a local restaurant. (BD)

 

TUE 24 JUL / SINGAPORE

Return to Gardens by the Bay for an exploration of this unique site itself. Built on 101 hectares of reclaimed land and opened in 2012, Gardens by the Bay is testimony to the garden revolution which Singapore has experienced in recent decades.

The centrepiece is two huge, cooled conservatories, each around a hectare in size: a Flower Dome bursting with specimens from the Mediterranean, South Africa, Australia and South America, and a Cloud Forest replicating the cool, moist conditions of the mountain forests of Southeast Asia and South America. Outside, an elevated walkway runs through a grove of ‘supertrees’, 25- to 50-metre tall vertical gardens growing ferns, vines and bromeliads.

Enjoy a farewell lunch atop the Marina Bay Sands Resort, 57 floors above street level, with a spectacular panoramic view of the city, bay and gardens of Singapore.
Mid-afternoon return to the hotel for an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

WED 25 JUL / DEPART SINGAPORE

Tour arrangements conclude after breakfast. For those departing Singapore today, Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements. (B)

Victoria’s Private Gardens and their Designers

Victoria’s Private Gardens and their Designers with Deryn Thorpe

 

Tour Highlights

With Deryn Thorpe, visit some of Victoria’s most beautiful gardens and meet the owners and the designers who created them.

Meet celebrity designer Paul Bangay who takes us through his own spectacular rural garden called Stonefields.

Rare plant collector, nurseryman and former Gardening Australia host, Stephen Ryan, will spend the day with the group showcasing the gardens of Mt Macedon. This will include a visit to his 25 year-old home garden ‘Tugurium’.

Spend a day with Deryn Thorpe and ABC Perth radio presenter, Sabrina Hahn at the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show.

View the work of Phillip Johnson, the only Australian designer to win a gold medal and a ‘Best In Show’ award for his landscape display at the Chelsea Garden Show; we visit Lubra Bend in the Yarra Valley and his own private garden in the Dandenong Ranges.

Meet award-winning Melbourne designer Jim Fogarty who introduces us to Cranbourne’s Australian Garden, gives us a talk on using indigenous plants, and shows us one of is inner-Melbourne design projects.

Tour the magnificent gardens at Cruden Farm with Michael Morrison who worked tirelessly with Dame Elisabeth Murdoch for more than four decades. Michael is co-author of the recently published Cruden Farm Garden Diaries.

Spend a day with landscape architect and former presenter for ABC TV’s Gardening Australia, John Patrick, who introduces us to a number of spectacular gardens of the Mornington Peninsula. John will also host us for lunch in his home garden.

 

11-day Cultural Garden Tour of Victoria

 

Overnight Ballarat (3 nights) • Melbourne (3 nights) • Flinders (2 nights) • Melbourne (2 nights)

 

Overview

Visit some of Victoria’s most beautiful gardens and meet the owners and the designers who created them.

This new tour visits some of Victoria’s most important gardens and interesting home gardens. What sets this tour apart is spending time with the home owners and designers who make the gardens come to life as they describe their struggles and triumphs. We also meet some of the garden leaders for ASA, who join the tour to show us their home gardens, gardens they have designed and share their knowledge of the Victorian design aesthetic and their own garden passions.

The tour travels to the Ballarat goldfields, Daylesford spa country, the green heart of the Macedon ranges, the picturesque Yarra Valley, fern glades and forests of the Dandenongs, Victoria’s award winning native garden at Cranbourne and coastal and inland areas of the Mornington Peninsula. The gardens in these areas are very different due to varying soils, climatic conditions and the desires and styles of the garden owner and designers, so they’ll be lots of variety.

We’ll see flowery cottage gardens, cool rainforest designs, grand estates, striking use of Australian plants, dry gardens, contemporary spaces, relaxed country gardens, coastal landscapes, an inner-city design and collector’s gardens and get to spend a day at the Melbourne Flower and Garden Show.

 

Ballarat – 3 nights

Day 1: Saturday 17 March, Arrive Melbourne – Ballarat

  • Coach journey from Melbourne airport to Ballarat
  • Cameron House – a florist’s garden
  • Welcome Dinner

Our private coach collects us at Melbourne airport and drives to Ballarat, a city with ornate architecture built during the prosperous days of the 1850s gold rush. First we visit Cameron House, a quirky home garden created by Greg Block, an ex-florist with a passion for form, texture and shape. Recycled garden materials including fronds and branches have been transformed into beautiful sculptures which enhance a garden overflowing with potted plants including a big collection of ferns, bonsai and topiary.

We drive to the historic Craig’s Royal Hotel, a grand boutique hotel, dating to the gold rush which will be our home for three nights.

Tonight we enjoy a welcome dinner at a local restaurant. (Overnight Craig’s Royal Hotel, Ballarat) D

 

Day 2: Sunday 18 March, Ballarat – Ascot – Creswick – Clunes – Coghills Creek – Ballarat

  • Begonia extravaganza at Robert Clark Conservatory
  • Lambley Nursery, the garden of horticulturalist David Glenn, Ascot
  • Pub lunch in historic Creswick
  • Free time in Goldfields streetscape of Clunes
  • Wine tasting at Eastern Peake Winery

We’ll walk through colourful bedding displays and beneath mature trees in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens to visit the spectacular autumn begonia display in the Robert Clark Conservatory. The showcase includes large flowered tuberous begonias in pots and pendulous varieties in baskets with perfect blooms in a rainbow of colours and forms.

We transfer to Lambley Nursery in Ascot, home of horticulturalist David Glen and his wife the artist Criss Canning. Their gardens have been created around an old farmhouse. David has learnt to work with Ballarat’s harsh climate and has transformed barren paddocks into a beautifully designed space overflowing with colour and structure. In autumn the spectacular display gardens which feature many salvias and dahlias are looking spectacular. The striking dry garden, which is watered no more than four times a year, will supply inspiration to those gardening with limited water. David is a plant breeder and his best known release is Euphorbia ‘Ascot Rainbow’ and he also trials flowers, fruits and vegetables which are on display in his bountiful and beautiful edible garden which feeds his family.

From Ascot we travel to Creswick for a light lunch at The American Hotel. There will also be some time at leisure for a short stroll up and down the town’s historic streets.

In the afternoon we travel to Clunes which has streetscapes straight out of a colonial history book. The picturesque and laid-back town is the most original and intact gold town in Australia and we have free time to appreciate the well-preserved 19th-century architecture.

Our last stop is to Eastern Peake Winery for wine tasting. Set on a small plateau at Coghills Creek the boutique winery, which was established in 1983, has the granite outcrop of Mt Bolton as its dramatic backdrop. (Overnight Craig’s Royal Hotel, Ballarat) BL

 

Day 3: Monday 19 March, Ballarat – Denver – Daylesford – Trentham – Ballarat

  • Stonefields, designer Paul Bangay’s home garden
  • Spa town of Daylesford
  • Frogmore, the garden of a horticulturalist and a florist

The day is spent in the country and our first stop is the home of celebrity designer Paul Bangay, widely regarded as the foremost garden designer in Australia. For more than 25 years he has created timeless and elegant designs around the world. He will take us through his own spectacular rural garden called Stonefields and will talk to us about the process of design as he shows us through the garden’s series of elegant and formal garden rooms. They include an entry court, front courtyard with water rill, burgundy rose garden, white garden with formal pond, apple walk, mirror image back garden overlooking the countryside and relaxed woodland garden.

Next we visit the charming spa town of Daylesford and have time to wander the picturesque streets full of boutique shops and find a café for lunch.

In the afternoon we journey onto Frogmore Gardens which started in 2002 when florist Zena Bethell and horticulturalist Jack Marshall bought eight acres of land near Trentham. Three hectares adjoining the Wombat State Forest have been transformed into a spectacular garden and Jack will explain the ideas behind his plant combinations as he takes us on a tour to see beds overflowing with dramatic perennials and annuals in dramatic, colour-themed wide herbaceous borders. He also has a passion for grasses which move theatrically in the breeze in the drought tolerant, prairie-style gardens. (Overnight Craig’s Royal Hotel, Ballarat) B

 

Melbourne – 3 nights

 

Day 4: Tuesday 20 March, Ballarat – Macedon Ranges – Melbourne

  • Morning tea and tour of Tugurium, home garden of former Gardening Australia host Stephen Ryan
    Bolobek, a historic garden with designer flair
  • Lunch in the gardens of Bolobek
  • Alton Gardens Hill Station

We leave Melbourne for the green heart of the Macedon Ranges to visit the home garden of raconteur, rare plant collector, nurseryman and ASA garden leader Stephan Ryan. Stephen will show us through his 25 year-old home garden which includes a woodland area beneath a Eucalypt canopy, orchard with circular lawn, vegetable garden, perennial border and pond.

Stephen will spend the day with the group showcasing the gardens of Macedon.

We’ll meet Bridget Robertson who bought Bolobek, a historic working cattle property, with husband Hugh in 2006. This garden was laid out in the early 1900s and today demonstrates how a creative design style can be overlaid on an earlier garden landscape. Bolobek is on the Victorian Heritage Register because of the quality of its design, artistry and plantings. Bridget will share stories of the people that made the garden and we’ll admire its geometric design which focuses on attractive bark, soft green foliage and white flowers.

Following a light lunch at Bolobek, Stephen will lead us on a tour of Alton Gardens, an Australian terraced hill station around an 1870s home with an amazing collection of 600 trees, 24 of them on the National Trust Register of Significant Trees.

In the late afternoon we transfer to the Rydges Hotel in Melbourne, our home for three nights. (Overnight Rydges Melbourne) BL

 

Day 5: Wednesday 21 March, Melbourne

  • 24th Melbourne International Garden & Flower Show

It’s a ten minute stroll from our hotel to the Melbourne International Flower and Garden show, the biggest and best in the Southern Hemisphere and we’ll get there for 9am when the gates open. The show is ranked in the top five flower shows in the world and floral displays fill the world heritage listed Royal Exhibition Building.

Deryn will be joined by ASA garden leader Sabrina Hahn, best known as ABC Perth garden talkback presenter and for her weekly chat with Trevor Chappell on ABC Radio Overnights. Deryn and Sabrina will ensure you get the most from the show and will take ASA clients on a tour of the landscape displays which are created by some of Australia’s most talented landscape designers. They will introduce clients to the designers who will tell the group about the philosophy behind their designs and Deryn and Sabrina will highlight elements that we can incorporate in our own backyards. (Overnight Rydges Melbourne) B

 

Day 6: Thursday 22 March, Melbourne – Yarra Valley – Melbourne

  • Visit to Lubra Bend with design Phillip Johnson
  • Lunch and garden tour of Alowyn Gardens by its owner, John Van de Linde
  • Guided tour and afternoon tea at Dame Nelly Melba’s home, Coombe Estate

We spend the day in the Yarra Valley, firstly with Phillip Johnson, the only Australian designer to win a gold medal and a ‘Best In Show’ award for his landscape display at the Chelsea Garden Show.

At Lubra Bend Phillip has created sprawling wetlands from a dry garden by capturing water to sustain a network of billabongs which cascade down to the Yarra River. Land was recontoured and boulders selected and positioned by hand to create natural sculptures. Phillip will explain how the garden was created.

We’ll also hear about the creation of a garden from bare paddocks by owner, John Van de Linde from Alowyn Gardens. After three years clearing blackberry from paddocks and improving the soil the first tree was planted in 1999. The four acre gardens are designed along strong symmetrical lines and include a perennial border, a silver birch forest, edible garden, and a formal parterre garden leading through to a series of small courtyards and display gardens.

We leave the gardens and travel a short distance to Coombe Estate. In 1909, after twenty years singing around the world, Dame Nelly Melba created a home and seven acre garden that has been preserved in its original state. Our guided tour of Coombe Estate will take in the Italianate garden and pool, French style rose garden, English herbaceous border, Australian garden and kitchen garden, all surrounded by a 10-metre high hedge, running 700 metres around the garden’s perimeter that was recorded in paintings by Hans Heysen in 1914. (Overnight Rydges Melbourne) BL

 

Flinders – 2 nights

 

Day 7: Friday 23 March, Melbourne – Olinda – Cranbourne – Flinders

  • Designer Phillip Johnson takes us through his natural billabong garden
  • Jeremy Francis’ Cloudehill, a masterpiece garden in Olinda
  • Homely lunch at Seasons Restaurant
  • Designer Jim Fogarty gives us a tour of The Australian Garden at Cranbourne

We meet Phillip Johnson again today as he takes us through the home garden he created at Olinda which inspired his award-winning Chelsea garden in 2013 for Flemings Nurseries. His gorgeous garden has a sustainable billabong, surrounded by tree ferns, that doubles as a chemical free swimming pool. It has a waterfall, spa and is surrounded by garden featuring many indigenous plants.

Just down the road is Cloudehill where a maze of stone walls and jewel-like garden rooms are set within woodlands of historic cool climate trees. Over the last 25 years Jeremy Francis has created a garden on deep volcanic loam and a rainfall of 1.25 metres a year on a site that was formerly a cut flower nursery. Jeremy is a master gardener with an exquisite eye for detail and design. He will guide us to areas looking their best in autumn, including the tranquil water garden, the warm coloured perennial borders and two of Australia’s best Japanese maples. Keep an eye out for the detailed paving, few gardens do it as well as Cloudehill.

We’ll enjoy an old-fashioned, tasty lunch in Seasons Restaurant which has windows overlooking the gorgeous Cloudehill gardens.

In the afternoon we travel to Cranbourne where award-winning Melbourne designer Jim Fogarty, who is also a leader for ASA, takes us on a private tour of the multi-award winning Australian Garden. The garden shows the dramatic variety of Australian plants in an inspiring and immersive display of flora, landscapes, art and architecture. Set over 15 hectares the garden follows the journey of water from the arid inland landscapes of central Australia, along dry river beds and down mighty rivers to the coastal fringes of the continent.

Our tour will take in the dramatic red sand garden, rock pool waterways, Eucalypt walk and exhibition gardens all featuring Australian plants and Jim will use his designer eye to explain the design concept and plantings.

We drive to the Flinders Hotel, home for the next two nights. (Overnight Flinders Hotel) BLD

 

Day 8: Saturday 24 March, Flinders – Sorrento – Moorooduc – Flinders

  • Tour of Designer Fiona Brockhoff’s coastal home garden (to be confirmed)
  • Visit and lunch at The Garden Vineyard, one of Australia’s finest gardens
  • Rick Ekersley’s Musk Cottage (to be confirmed)

Talk on using indigenous plants in design by Jim Fogarty and Charles Solomon in the garden of Jim’s holiday home

We are joined today by landscape architect John Patrick, best known as presenter with ABC TV’s Gardening Australia, and leader for ASA. John will spend the day on the peninsula with us where our first visit is to a private garden in Sorrento.

Designer Fiona Brockhoff’s Sorrento garden called Karkalla, is more than 20 years old and showcases the importance of creating gardens in sympathy with the local environment. It is influential and much admired for the way it embraces its coastal location, modern aesthetic and sculptural use of Australian plants.

We continue to Moorooduc to visit the Garden Vineyard which features in Monte Don’s book and television program Around the World in 80 Gardens. Architects Sue McFall and her husband Darryl are the owners of one of Australia’s finest gardens. It was created in 1986 with many European plants but the plant palate has changed to suit our drying climate. There are several European-style rooms including a memorable silver garden, walled courtyard, a big perennial border and a formal area flanked by lilly pillys. The terrace overlooks a lawn that rolls down to a garden with only Australian plants and the adjoining lawns lawn lead to a display of maples in the glorious red foliage of autumn.

Designer Rick Eckersley’s sustainable garden, Musk Cottage, is on a ten acre block and was purchased to showcase a different way of creating gardens on the Mornington Peninsula. It combines Australian plants with others that suit a low maintenance, no-water garden. He describes it as a ‘multicultural melting pot’ of plants. Boggy areas have been transformed into a wetland in a garden that over the last ten years has continued to evolve and mature.

Jim Fogarty welcomes us to his holiday home in Flinders and is joined by Charles Solomon from Garawana Creative. Jim will talk about how the design was inspired by indigenous shapes of moving water and waterholes and will address the design challenges, including a small budget and a site that floods each winter.

Jim and Charles will explain some of the indigenous uses of the key plants in the garden. (Overnight Flinders Hotel) BL

 

Melbourne – 1 night

 

Day 9: Sunday 25 March, Flinders – Shoreham – Melbourne

  • Bagnols, a garden designed by Paul Bangay in Shoreham
  • Heronswood Gardens (to be confirmed)
  • Tour of Cruden Farm with garden manager Michael Morrison

Paul Bangay designed this garden to complement the French country manor design of the home. Built on a 1.5 hectare block with water views to Western Port and Bass Strait, the garden is divided into rooms and has an olive grove, dam, sunny lawn, shrubberies and paving beside a pergola supporting climbing roses. Paving is edged with lavender, garden beds made edged with box and an extravagant grassy staircase rises from a gravel boules court to a wide, flat lawn.

We will have lunch at historic Heronswood House where the vegetables and fruits served are heirloom selections picked straight from the gardens. Afterwards Deryn will take us on a tour of Diggers, a garden where edible plants replace many traditional ornamentals in the display gardens. Display gardens include ornamental vegetable borders and gardens with succulents and flowering perennials.

We travel to one of Australia’s best known gardens, Cruden Farm, which was given to the late Dame Elisabeth Murdoch in 1928 as a wedding present from her husband Sir Keith Murdoch. She cherished the farm at Langwarrin throughout her long life and created a fine garden with garden manager, Michael Morrison, who will lead us on a garden tour. We’ll take a stroll to the lake and walk through herbaceous borders, the picking garden, shrub walks and famous avenue of lemon scented gums that lead to the house before enjoying afternoon tea. (Overnight Rydges Melbourne) BL

 

Day 10: Monday 26 March, Depart Melbourne

  • Visit a Glen Iris garden with designer Jim Fogarty
  • Visit two design projects by Andrew Laidlaw
  • Light Lunch and a talk on design trends in the home garden of designer John Patrick
    Farewell dinner at Locanda

Today we learn more about the process of garden design when we reconnect with ASA leader Jim Fogarty who will take us through a private garden he designed in Glen Iris.

Jim will take us through the owner’s design brief and explain how he came up with an attractive and traditional design that followed the owner’s instructions. They said that they did not want a garden full of hedges and asked him to retain some of the mature trees, connect the front porch with the garden and reduced areas of red brick paving. We’ll get to see the results!

We then travel to the small, inner city home garden of landscape architect John Patrick, who will share his knowledge of Melbourne garden design trends and forecast the future of Australian garden design.

Today we also meet with Andrew Laidlaw who designed the Potter Foundation Children’s Garden in the Royal Botanic Gardens. Andrew has kindly agreed to show us two of his designs for residential homes in the Hawthorn area.

We have a farewell dinner tonight in a private dining area at Locanda in The Rydges Hotel. (Overnight Rydges Melbourne) BLD

 

Day 11: Tuesday 27 March, Depart Melbourne

  • Morning transfer to Melbourne airport
  • Today a transfer to the airport, departing the hotel at 11.00am, will be provided. B
  • Physical Endurance & Practical Information

 

Physical Rating
The number of flags is a guide to the degree of difficulty of ASA tours relative to each other (not to those of other tour companies). It is neither absolute nor literal. One flag is given to the least taxing tours, seven to the most. Flags are allocated, above all, according to the amount of walking and standing each tour involves. Nevertheless all ASA tours require that participants have a good degree of fitness enabling 2-3 hours walking or 1-1.5 hours standing still on any given site visit or excursion. Many sites are accessed by climbing slopes or steps and have uneven terrain.

 

This 11-day Cultural Garden Tour of Victoria involves:

  • A moderate amount of walking mainly during outdoor site visits, often up and down hills and/or flights of stairs and uneven terrain.
  • A moderate amount of coach travel, several on winding mountainous roads
  • The daily schedule generally involves an early-morning departure (between 8.00-8.30am), concluding in the late afternoon (between 5.00-5.30pm)
  • 4-star hotels with 4 hotel changes
  • You must be able to carry your own hand-luggage. Hotel porterage only includes 1 piece of luggage per person.

It is important to remember that ASA programs are group tours, and slow walkers affect everyone in the group. As the group must move at the speed of the slowest member, the amount of time spent at a site may be reduced if group members cannot maintain a moderate walking pace. ASA tours should not present any problem for active people who can manage day-to-day walking and stair-climbing. However, if you have any doubts about your ability to manage on a program, please ask your ASA travel consultant whether this is a suitable tour for you.

Please note: it is a condition of travel that all participants agree to accept ASA’s directions in relation to their suitability to participate in activities undertaken on the tour, and that ASA retains the sole discretion to direct a tour participant to refrain from a particular activity on part of the tour. For further information please refer to the ASA Reservation Application Form.

 

Practical Information

Prior to departure, tour members will receive practical notes which include information on weather, clothing and what to pack.

Gardens of the Amalfi Coast, Sicily and Malta with Helen Young

Gardens of the Amalfi Coast, Sicily and Malta with Helen Young

 

The coastline of Italy’s Tyrrhenian Sea, gracefully easing down from Rome to the Amalfi Coast, joins hands with the historic Ionian islands of Sicily and Malta. For hundreds of years, travellers have come to bask in the beauty of these shores, and have built magnificent gardens to glorify this home of la dolce vita. Join Helen Young to admire the languid opulence of the gardens of Sorrento, Positano and the isles of Ischia and Capri, and the rugged beauty of the Mediterranean gardens of Sicily and Malta. In Rome, get a glimpse of the formal gardens of the Pope’s exclusive retreat of Castel Gandolfo, and wander through the captivating Vatican Gardens.

 

AT A GLANCE…

• Visit Sorrento, Positano, Ischia and Capri, whose naturalistic gardens overflow with verdant growth and colourful blossoms
• In Sicily, see gardens raised in the shadow of Mt Etna, and wander through picturesque Taormina and Syracuse
• Explore the gardens and palaces of Malta, where gardens of palm trees and succulents grow from the honey-coloured earth
• In Rome, visit the Pope’s private gardens at Castel Gandolfo, newly opened to the public for the first time, as well as the Vatican Gardens
• Optional post-tour to Gozo, Malta’s charming second island

 

ITINERARY

THURSDAY 03 MAY 2018

Suggested departure from Australia or New Zealand on Emirates flights via Dubai. Renaissance Tours or your travel agent can assist you with your travel arrangements.

 

FRI 04 MAY / ARRIVE ROME

Mid-afternoon arrival in Rome, and check in to your hotel. In the evening, join Helen and your fellow travellers for a welcome reception. (R)

 

SAT 05 MAY / ROME

Today, enjoy a full-day tour of the private gardens and palaces of the Vatican City and the Pope’s lakeside residence of Castel Gandolfo. First stop is the Vatican itself for a guided tour of the Vatican Museums, and the Vatican Gardens, which cover more than half of the Vatican City’s 44 hectares in central Rome. Then board the dedicated ‘Papal Express’ train bound for Castel Gandolfo, an exclave of the Vatican City perched above Lazio’s Lake Albano. Opened to the public only in 2014 by Pope Francis, visitors can now stroll through the Barberini Gardens. After lunch, explore the Apostolic Palace. Return by train to central Rome for an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

SUN 06 MAY / ROME – SORRENTO

After checking out of your hotel, travel to the remarkable landscape garden of Ninfa, described as ‘the most romantic garden in the world’. The settlement of Ninfa (from Latin ‘nymphaeum’ meaning ‘temple of the water nymphs’) was a flourishing Mediæval town with over 150 houses, a church, a castle, a town hall and a defensive wall, before being abandoned in the 17th century due to fears of malaria. It was not until the 20th century that the noble Caetani family established Ninfa as a landscape garden amidst the crumbling ruins. After free time for lunch, drive to Sorrento and check in to your hotel, followed by dinner. (BD)

 

MON 07 MAY / SORRENTO

Depart by ferry for a day-trip to the island of Capri, the iconic summertime retreat of the Amalfi Coast. Visit first the gardens of Villa San Michele, built by a 19th century Swedish doctor and philanthropist who created a terraced residence replete with intimate leafy walkways, Greek bronzes in its corridors and a red granite sphinx perched on the Siren Heights overlooking the Gulf of Naples. Enjoy lunch in a typical local restaurant and experience the true stile di Capri. After lunch, return to Sorrento, followed by an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

TUE 08 MAY / SORRENTO

This morning, depart by ferry for a tour of the gardens of Ischia, the picturesque volcanic isle lying off the northern horn of the Gulf of Naples. Explore the garden of La Mortella, named for the myrtle trees that grew on the site in the 1950s before British composer Sir William Walton turned it into the luxuriant gardens seen today. The garden’s key feature is its central Fountain of the Four Ponds filled with water lilies, strelitzia and Egyptian papyrus plants. After lunch, return to Sorrento. (BL)

 

WED 09 MAY / SORRENTO – RAVELLO

Check out from your hotel and drive to Positano, the glory of the Amalfi Coast. Enjoy a guided tour of Hotel Il San Pietro, a terraced garden and hotel built on the spot where St Peter supposedly first set foot on Italian soil, and after lunch in this spectacular setting, spend some free time in Positano in the afternoon. Continue to Ravello and check in to your hotel. (BL)

 

THU 10 MAY / RAVELLO

In the morning, explore Ravello with an orientation walking tour. Visit Villa Rufolo, whose 13th century origins are evident in its Arab-Norman tower and Moorish cloisters, and whose terraces look out over the Bay of Salerno. Villa Rufolo’s gardens overflow with terraces of orange, red and pink blossoms, shaded by palm trees so typical of Mediterranean gardens. Explore Villa Cimbrone, quiet hideaway of DH Lawrence, Winston Churchill other famous figures, whose Mediæval-style castle-palace incorporates elements inspired by Saracenic, Byzantine, Moorish and Renaissance architecture. Its garden features a 500 metre-long central nave shaded by cypress, acacia and arbutus, leading under a bridge hung with roses and wisteria.
After the conclusion of the walking tour, enjoy free time for lunch and the remainder of the afternoon and evening at leisure in Ravello. (B)

 

FRI 11 MAY / RAVELLO – CATANIA

Enjoy a leisurely morning in Ravello, before checking out from the hotel and transferring to Naples airport for a flight to the city of Catania in Sicily. (B)

 

SAT 12 MAY / CATANIA

In the morning, discover Catania with an orientation tour of the city centre. Explore the fascinating Orto Botanico of the University of Catania, which is divided into the Hortus Generalis (plant species from around the world) and the Hortus Siculus (Sicilian native plants). Wander the paths of the Giardino Bellini, Catania’s oldest urban park, where the planting is changed daily to depict the day’s date. Travel to the Giardino della Villa Trinità, a three-hectare garden on the slopes of Mount Etna, where citrus trees, palms, succulents and irises are set amongst the saje (traditional handmade irrigation channels) and the natural lava outcrops. Enjoy lunch in the garden before returning to your hotel for an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

SUN 13 MAY / CATANIA

Depart for a full-day tour to Taormina, an ancient city set between the towering Mount Etna and the azure waters of the Ionian Sea. Visit the Giardino della Villa Comunale, developed in the late 19th century by Lady Florence Trevelyan, a Scotswoman who had immigrated to Sicily after having an affair with the Prince of Wales, and her husband Salvatore Cacciola, a professor of histology and long-time mayor of Taormina. The garden’s olives, pines, palms, cypresses and creepers are typical of the Mediterranean biome. Continue to Casa Cuseni, ‘an English garden in the soil of Sicily’ designed by a trio of 19th century British artists. Casa Cuseni blends the familiar English garden design with the indigenous flora of the Mediterranean. Enjoy free time in Taormina for lunch and a stroll, before returning to Catania. (B)

 

MON 14 MAY / CATANIA – SYRACUSE

Depart Catania bound for Syracuse. En route visit the centuries-old estates of two noble families which have each been given a new lease on life with the addition of sumptuous gardens by their present owners. Travel first to the Villa Borghese and Giardino del Biviere in Lentini. In the 1960s, Principessa Maria Carla Borghese decided to turn the dry rocky bed of a drained lake into a lush garden, populated with plants drawn from her travels throughout the Mediterranean and gifted to her by foreign visitors. Next, visit the Estate of San Giuliano in Villasmundo for lunch, followed by a guided tour of the gardens. Created by the Marchese of San Giuliano in 1974, the garden is quartered into Arabian, Tropical, Mediterranean and Scented Flower sectors. Continue to Syracuse and check in to your hotel, followed by an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

TUE 15 MAY / SYRACUSE

Explore central Syracuse with a walking tour of Ortigia Island, the heart of the old city, and a visit to the Galleria Regionale del Palazzo Bellomo to discover its collection of art treasures from deconsecrated churches and convents. After lunch at a local restaurant, delve into the Hellenistic past of Syracuse with a tour of the Ancient Greek Theatre, recessed into the Temenite Hill and overlooking the Bay of Syracuse, and the 3rd century BC Altar of King Hiero II, the largest known altar from antiquity. Also visit the ancient quarries which supplied the doughty and durable limestone of which Greek Syracuse was built. (BL)

 

WED 16 MAY / SYRACUSE – VALLETTA

Enjoy a morning and early afternoon at leisure with late check out from your hotel, before departing for the city of Noto, the last stronghold of the Arabs against the conquering Normans in the 11th century. In Noto, watch organisers put the finishing touches on the famous Infiorata di Noto flower festival. In the afternoon, depart for the port city of Pozzallo, and after dinner at a local restaurant board the ferry to Malta, arriving in the late evening. (BD)

 

THU 17 MAY / VALLETTA

In the morning, take in the sights of Valletta, Malta’s honey-coloured capital city, with a walking tour of the Upper Barrakka Gardens, St John’s Co-Cathedral and the Armoury of the Grandmaster of the Knights of St John. After lunch at a local restaurant, visit the 5,500-year-old temple complex of Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra, whose Stone Age megaliths, one of the national symbols of Malta, are around a millennium older than even the most ancient of Egypt’s pyramids. Return to Valletta for an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

FRI 18 MAY / VALLETTA

After a morning visit to the Argotti Botanical Gardens in Valletta, travel to the town of Rabat and enter St Paul’s Grotto, the cave where the Apostle Paul is said to have lived after he was shipwrecked on the shores of Malta in 60 AD. Continue to Mdina, which served as the capital of Malta from antiquity to the Middle Ages, and discover the Siculo-Norman, Gothic and Baroque architecture of the houses of Malta’s noble families. After a visit to the Cathedral of St Paul, built on the spot where the Roman governor greeted the shipwrecked saint, enjoy a farewell lunch. After lunch, visit Naxxar’s 18th century Palazzo Parisio, residence of the Scicluna family, whose gilded ballroom has seen the palace dubbed ‘a miniature Versailles’. After a tour of the palace and its luxuriant Baroque gardens, enjoy some free time for afternoon tea before returning to Valletta. (BL)

 

SAT 19 MAY / DEPART VALLETTA

Tour arrangements conclude after breakfast. Suggested departure for Australia or New Zealand on Emirates flights via Dubai. (B)
OR
Join an optional two-night extension tour to Gozo.

 

POST TOUR EXTENSION ITINERARY

19–21 May 2018 (3 days) – Locally Guided

 

SATURDAY 19 MAY 2018 / VALLETTA – VICTORIA

After breakfast, drive to the port city of Ċirkewwa for a ferry ride to the picturesque island of Gozo. On arrival, proceed to Victoria, the capital of Gozo, with free time for lunch before a walking tour of the sights of the city. Built on one of the three hills of Gozo, Victoria is dominated by its honey-coloured Mediæval citadel. In the afternoon, check in to your hotel for dinner. (BD)

 

SUN 20 MAY / VICTORIA

Enjoy a full-day tour of the highlights of Gozo. In the morning, travel to Dwejra Bay, where the Mediterranean creeps through a natural archway underneath great limestone cliffs and forms the gentle, teal-coloured lagoon known as the Inland Sea. Explore the megaliths of Ġgantija, a 5,000-year-old temple complex dedicated to a Stone Age fertility goddess and continue to Calypso’s Cave, where the nymph Calypso was said to have trapped Odysseus for seven years. (For safety reasons, it is not possible to enter the cave – but given what happened to Odysseus, it is just as well!) Enjoy lunch in the beguiling fishing village of Xlendi, set between the steep hills and the deep sea. Visit the Villa Rundle Gardens, a Mediterranean-style garden established around 1915 by the British Governor of Malta, before returning to your hotel for an evening at leisure. (BL)

 

MON 21 MAY / VICTORIA – VALLETTA

After breakfast, check out from hotel and return to Malta island by ferry. Transfer to Valletta Airport arriving by 12:30, where tour arrangements conclude. Suggested departure for Australia or New Zealand on Emirates flights via Dubai departing from 15:30 onwards. (B)

 

Celebrating Gardens and Roses

Celebrating Gardens and Roses of Japan with Sophie Thomson

 

TOUR ITINERARY:

 

Day 1 Wed 25 Oct Arrive Tokyo

On arrival in Tokyo, make your own way to your hotel. The rest of the day is at your leisure.

 

Day 2 Thu 26 Oct Tokyo

After breakfast we visit the Kyosumi Garden. In the afternoon, we visit Senso-ji Temple and Asakusa for a taste of traditional Japan. Senso-ji is one of the very popular temples in Tokyo while the Asukusa area that surrounds it provides a wonderful variety of snacks, restaurants and souvenir shopping. In the afternoon, we will visit the historic Imperial Palace East Gardens, an oasis of calm in the middle of this giant city. Edo Castle was once the residence of the Tokugawa shoguns who ruled Japan from 1603 to 1867. The old site of the castle now makes up the park and garden areas. Later we marvel at skyscraper views from the heights of iconic Tokyo Tower. Welcome dinner tonight. (B, D)

 

Day 3 Fri 27 Oct Tokyo

Today we will take an excursion to Keisei Rose Garden and Sakura Rose Garden.
Keisei Rose Garden has over 1600 rose varieties and 10,000 plants. This rose garden is owned by the Japanese agent for many international commercial rose breeders, including the infamous French rose breeder Meilland. Sakura Rose Garden is a municipal rose garden with an emphasis on heritage roses. (B)

 

Day 4 Sat 28 Oct Tokyo-Atami-Hakone

We escape Tokyo and journey by private coach to Hakone via Atami. Hopefully weather permitting we will get an excellent view of Mount Fuji. We will visit Akao Herb & Rose Garden in Atami. Continue travel to Hakone, where we will visit the Hakone Open-Air Museum, home to over 120 permanent Japanese and Western sculptures, in a garden setting. (B, D)

 

Day 5 Sun 29 Oct Hakone-Nagoya-Takayama

Transfer to Odawara station for bullet train to Takayama via Nagoya. Arrive in Takayama, we will visit Kusakabe Folk Crafts Museum. This building dating from the 1890s showcases the striking craftsmanship of traditional Takayama carpenters. Tonight enjoy a Hida beef dinner. (B, D)

 

Day 6 Mon 30 Oct Takayama

Work off your breakfast with a relaxing walking tour of the morning market. Take a walking tour around the downtown area. Many of the old town streets date from the Edo Period and are perfect for people who love to browse. Then we take an excursion to the remote mountains of Honshu to visit the UNESCO listed Shirakawa-go Village, famous for their traditional gassho-zukuri farmhouses, some of which are more than 250 years old. It is a fairytale walk back in time with quaint original cottages, water wheels and paddy fields. Return to Takayama for overnight. (B)

 

Day 7 Tue 31 Oct Takayama-Kani-Nagoya-Okayama

Today we travel by coach to visit the Flower Festival Commemorative Park in Kani which has over 7000 varieties of roses and 30,000 plants. The garden has two main sections with their own themes. The first is the Rose Theme Garden which contains 14 themed gardens such as the Fragrant Rose Garden, the Royal Rose Garden and the Blue Rose Garden. The second is the World Rose Garden with roses gathered from all over the world and planted by country. Then we take coach to Nogoya station for our train to Okayama. (B, D)

 

Day 8 Wed 01 Nov Okayama

We will visit Adachi Museum of Art, established in 1970, based on the private collection of Zenko Adachi. Works collected include Japanese paintings by famous painters such as Taikan Yokoyama, Shiho Sakakibara and Shunso Hishida. The museum’s gardens are also famous. A true lover of gardens, Adachi collected each of the pines and stones for the garden himself from around the country, creating a beautiful garden filled with his own passion. (B, L)

 

Day 9 Thu 02 Nov Okayama-Kyoto

After breakfast, we visit the magnificent Okayama Castle, nicknamed “Crow Castle” because of its very black colour. Then we explore the colourful and expansive Koraku-en Garden, another of the “Three Great Gardens” of Japan that celebrates the typical features of a Japanese landscape garden. Later we travel by bullet train to Kyoto. (B)

 

Day 10 Fri 03 Nov Kyoto

Today we visit Gio-ji Temple. It presides over a magnificent grove of thick magical moss that just about begs you to lie down on it (you are strictly forbidden), straight out of a fairytale. Then we head to the picturesque Arashiyama District for a relaxing walk through the peaceful Bamboo Forest. (B)

 

Day 11 Sat 04 Nov Kyoto

Today we will experience a truly Japanese cultural event, a tea ceremony at Kodaiji Temple, one of the most well-known temples in Japan. Then visit the peaceful Ryoan-ji Temple home to the famous Zen rock garden. It is fortunately right next door to Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion), another treasure! (B)

 

Day 12 Sun 05 Nov Kyoto

This morning we visit the I M Pei-designed Miho Museum in Shiga Prefecture. The building is a work of art in itself, as it sits in perfect harmony with an incredible mountain landscape. It is best known for its Shigaraki pottery as well as an incredible collection of artworks belonging to the founder of the museum, Koyama Mihoko, one of the richest women in Japan, and her daughter Hiroko. Afternoon is at your leisure. Farewell dinner tonight. (B, D)

 

Day 13 Mon 06 Nov Depart Kyoto

Our tour ends after breakfast. Make your own way to the airport for your onward flight. (B)

Nature Lovers Tour of Borneo

Nature Lovers Tour of Borneo with Mary-Lou Lewis

 

TOUR ITINERARY

 

Day 1 Sun 24 Sep Arrive in Kuching
Arrive in Kuching, Sarawak, check in to Hilton Kuching.

 

Day 2 Mon 25 Sep Kuching

Visit the famous Kuching Museum, ride sampans to cross the Sarawak River. Pass the white rajah’s residence, see the orchid garden on the other side of the Kuching Waterfront. Make an offering at a Chinese Buddhist temple. Visit the night market. Sample the famous offerings of satay, kolo mee and other Kuching favourites. After dinner stroll beneath wide trees along the romantic big lazy riverfront. Colonial buildings with the old shops of the bazaar enrich the experience. Overnight at Hilton Kuching. (B)

 

Day 3 Tue 26 Sep Kuching-Bako National Park

Bus to Kampong Bako. Take a long boat to Bako National Park arriving through the mangroves. Immediately encounter unusual plants, tropical littoral abundance. See wildlife such as naughty macaques and proboscis monkeys, wild pigs, an incredible variety of birds and insects. Spot light for shy jungle creatures at night. Overnight at Bako National Park Hostel. (B,L,D)

 

Day 4 Wed 27 Sep Bako National Park

Walk the Lintang trail where practically all vegetation types at Bako can be seen. Forest types range from mangrove to kerangas (heath forest), tropical swamp vegetation, cliff vegetation and beach vegetation. There are several side trails to follow inside the park depending on level of fitness and interest. All the trails have a great variety of vegetation, from mighty 80-metre dipterocarp trees such as Shorea species to dense mangrove forest. Unusual carnivorous pitcher plants and interesting symbiotic relationships are found on the Lintang trail. The park’s coastline is dotted with small bays, coves and beaches. Overnight at Bako National Park Hostel. (B,L,D)

 

Day 5 Thu 28 Sep Bako National Park

Hike the boardwalks through wetlands, swim in secluded jungle pools and on beaches of the South China Sea. Watch proboscis monkeys feeding on jungle fruits. Look for the Rufous-backed Kingfisher, Stork-billed Kingfisher, Red-crowned Barbet, Woodpeckers, Broadbills, Mangrove Blue Flycatcher, Babblers, and owls.
Overnight at Bako National Park Hostel. (B,L,D)

 

Day 6 Fri 29 Sep Bako National Park-Kuching

Proceed back to Kuching. En-route, we will visit to the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre to catch the feeding time of the orang utans. Along the way, we will pass by the ethno-botanical gardens, with their unique collection of rain-forest plants. Arrive in Kuching and check in Hilton Kuching for overnight. (B,L)

 

Day 7 Sat 30 Sep Kuching-Mulu National Park

Morning flight to Mulu National Park. This World Heritage-listed area allows canopy walks and treks that reveal exotic creatures, spectacular caves and stunning limestone karst formations. There is Deer Cave, which can fit five cathedrals the size of London’s Saint Pauls. The massive caves here are home to millions of bats and cave swiftlets that swarm out into the jungle in great clouds every evening at dusk! It is an extraordinary sight.
Overnight and dinner at Mulu Marriott Resort. (B,L,D)

 

Day 8 Sun 01 Oct Mulu National Park

After breakfast, we depart by longboat to explore Wind Cave with a stopover at the Penan Longhouse. Later we proceed to explore Clearwater Cave, the longest cave in Southeast Asia. Overnight and dinner at Mulu Marriott Resort. (B,L,D)

 

Day 9 Mon 02 Oct Mulu National Park

After breakfast in the resort, we proceed to Mulu Canopy Skywalk. The Skywalk is the longest tree canopy walk in the world. Relax at the jungle café. Overnight and dinner at Mulu Marriott Resort. (B,L,D)

 

Day 10 Tue 03 Oct Mulu National Park-Kota Kinabalu

Free at leisure until our flight to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah (the Land Below the Wind). In the evening, we explore the Phillipino night Market. Overnight at Grandis Hotel Kota Kinabalu.(B,L)

 

Day 11 Wed 04 Oct Kota Kinabalu

Today is free for you to explore Kota Kinabalu at your own pace. Overnight at Grandis Hotel Kota Kinabalu.(B)

 

Day 12 Thu 05 Oct Kota Kinabalu-Mt. Kinabalu

Traverse along Sabah’s Crocker Range to Kinabalu Park, a World Heritage Site nominated by UNESCO. Enjoy the walks around the park headquarters. Climb through several ecological zones to experience plant communities ranging from tropical rainforest to the sub-alpine. Overnight and dinner at Kinabalu Pine Resort. (B,L,D)

 

Day 13 Fri 06 Oct Mt. Kinabalu

Trek through the rainforest and witness life in the treetops as you walk along the Canopy Walkway Venture along Jungle Trails to visit waterfall. Lunch at Poring Springs. There are steaming hot pools providing a relaxing place to unwind after trekking the slopes of Mount Kinabalu. Overnight and dinner at Kinabalu Pine Resort. (B,L,D)

 

Day 14 Sat 07 Oct Mt. Kinabalu-Kota Kinabalu

Visit the Kundasang War Memorial where the Sandakan Death March ended. The Memorial is made up of four beautiful gardens. Also visit the Kundasng vegetables markets before returning back to Kota Kinabalu. Overnight at Grandis Hotel Kota Kinabalu. (B,L)

 

Day 15 Sun 08 Oct Depart Kota Kinabalu

Our tour ends after breakfast. (B)

 

INCLUSIONS

 

Internal flights within Borneo; 11 nights’ accommodation at 4 star hotels/resorts with breakfast daily, 3 nights’ accommodation at Bako National Park Hostel*; private group transfers and touring with English speaking local guides; meals as stated in the itinerary.
* Bako National Park Hostel: the accommodation in Bako National Park has ceiling fan only and no air-conditioning. The shower rooms do have hot water and it is on sharing basis.