European garden odyssey

I have just spent a week travelling from Amsterdam to Bruges, visiting some of the best gardens in Holland and Belgium as well as time at Floriade, the world horticultural expo in Venlo, held only once every 10 years.

Here are the highlights of my European garden odyssey, starting with my time at Floriade:

This amazing horticultural extravaganza turned out to be a glorious gardening exposition, full of sensational displays, creative landscaping ideas and all sorts of sensory surprises.

It was totally unexpected, for instance, to turn a corner and find a tree wearing a sweater. Or to walk into a water garden and find furniture that looked like granite that turned out to be made of foam rubber.

It was a delight, too, to sit at a sushi-style conveyor belt and be invited to pick off products that could either be tasted (cheese, herb dishes, heritage tomatoes) or felt (sheep’s wool, stone products, bulbs) or keep and taken home as a present (forget-me-not seeds, miniature plant pots or squeezable egg designed to relieve stress).

It was interesting to walk through a series of 15 innovative small-spaced gardens, each with a novel idea, such as a lunch time play space for office workers or an courtyard food garden planted whimsically with nothing but asparagus.

And it was a particularly stimulating sensory treat to walk along a path through dense woodland that was wired for sound. Short bursts of music or spoken words or weird unfamiliar sounds added a sense of the surreal to the mystery of the forest and heightened the experience of a walk through a wood with all its comforting as well as unnerving characteristics.

Spread over a 66-hectare site, Floriade, which opened in April and runs until Oct. 7, also featured some impressive architecture, such as a wavy steel and glass entrance, stylish bridge and large amphitheatre.

But none of this compared to the sleek, spacious contemporary landscaping that greets you on the inside where immense reflecting ponds and wide paths and a colourful sweeping tapestry of flowers in long curving borders define and separate five themed zones.

People go to Floriade to be wowed. They want to see things they haven’t seen before or can’t see anywhere else. The wow factor is there in buckets. Or, rather, I should say the wow factor is there in baskets – dozens of brightly coloured plastic shopping bags packed with gerberas and other flowers, bringing a whimsical new slant to the term “hanging basket”.

From massive ball of daisies to gigantic grass sofa, Floriade has a lot of entertaining features. There were movie-theatre pavilions where you could experience being swallowed by a flower or stand in the dark and watch the world turn under your feet as you go from country to country to see horticulture at work.

Corten steel with its rusty orange patina was featured everywhere, for large tree containers, raised planters mass planted with red-orange foliage heucheras, and even used as the material for a caravan in a garden with a group of topiary cyclists made out of tightly bended strips of Chinese privet (Ligustrum delavayanum).