Gardens and rain

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I visited two botanical gardens .. the private one is Monte Real Palace Tropical Gardens and is accessible by a cable car from the seafront in Funchal. The garden is about 500 metres high, so it is an exciting journey up there. One of the things I enjoyed was this bird’s eye view of the city ; it is a civil engineer’s dream. There are complex roads, tunnels, bridges, streets with hairpin curves, steep embankments, etc. And it is densely populated, so the road system is a highly complex network.

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The gardens are impressive, splaying down a steep ravine with large mature trees and many flowers and plants of interest. There were several waterfalls and pools and multiple viewpoints with fantastic views over the city and Atlantic Ocean. Of course I have to have a moan and in this case it is the ‘Japanese Garden’ …. a major feature which seemed very bogus to me. There are several red steel bridges and gates, a few Oriental statues … but none of the sense of beauty that I have seen in Japanese gardens in England or Holland … never mind Japan. No large stones, no raked gravel .. no sense of serendipity … no this is faux Japanese. I would love to hear a Japanese garden’s critique of this place. Note: I did not find any support for my opinion and Wikipedia even features the Japanese lanterns from the gardens as worthy of special mention.

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What I don’t know about plants would fill a book, but I had never (knowingly) seen a hydrangea tree before (I thought they were houseplants or shrubs) ; alas, my attempt at photographing the tree was not very successful, but it was beautiful.

I caught a bus (No 48) at the top of the gardens which took a long winding route through suburbs back to the area near my hotel this proved to be even more hair-raising than the cable car. The bus driver from the airport was not the only dare devil .. all bus drivers seem to be speed freaks.

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Light showers were forecast for Wednesday but I set out for the city centre and found that the rain had turned very heavy .. so got back to the hotel by noon and spent the day indoors reading. That night I woke up to ferocious gales which were rattling the balcony furniture. They died down enough by morning to go out and I took a local bus (No 31) to the municipal Jardim Botanical. At only 3 Euros, this was cheaper than the Monte Real’s 10 Euro entry and frankly, they were very impressive indeed. I have never been a big fan of topiary (the art of creating sculptures using clipped trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs) but I now realise that this was because so much of it I have seen (esp in Thailand) is of animals which I found a little too “cute”. Here the forms are almost exclusvily geometric and are very striking. I also enjoyed the contrast of the cacti garden with bougainvillea trailing down nearby walls. The cable cars were not operating due to high winds which persisted through the day.

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In the early evening the high winds picked up again and as one of the cruise ships hooted its way out of the bay I was happy to be on dry land .. the Atlantic did not seem at all appealing. Luckily, that ended the brief spell of bad weather and although there were cloudy periods, the rest of the week was nice.