A magical place, always – the Harold Porter National Botanical Garden

We are happy to be back after a three long months’ journey into Europe and are enjoying the simple things in life again – a long sleep after a night’s deluge, waking up to a cool but bright blue sunny sky, brunch with home-baked bread, champignons fried in butter with garlic and smoked paprika, braised tomatoes topped with herbs from our early summer garden and a drive out to the Botanical Garden to refresh our senses.
Stepping into the Harold Porter National Botanical Garden at any time of any day is always a joy. It is so beautifully and unobtrusively laid out against the mountains that one is hardly aware of the many hands continuously at work to bring nature and culture together to form a harmonious entity. And seeing that our own garden has some elements of this type of naturalness we jokingly treat the Harold Porter National Botanical Garden as an extension of our own. Others surely must have similar sentiments. It is a sign of a well designed garden that you immediately feel at home in it as if you had planned it this way yourself.