Over the past eight years, I have led 20 garden tours around the world. My first tour was a cruise around Italy and to Croatia, starting in Rome and visiting Florence and Sicily and Venice and seeing some spectacular gardens on the way – Villa d’Este outside Rome, Boboli garden in Florence, Villa Cimbrone in Ravello and the botanical garden in Padua and many others.
But I was never very keen the fact that one minute we were totally immersed in Italy and then we were back on the cruise ship with waiters serving us who came from anywhere but Italy. I preferred the total immersion.
From that point on, I decided to concentrate on “land tours” and they have been hugely successful. Each one has been a glorious party from start to finish. We have taken groups to Brazil, China, Japan, South Africa, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Singapore, Philadelphia and, of course, the garden-rich countries of Holland, France, Belgium, Scotland and England. Whew! Yes, I feel exhausted just hearing that. But it was all terrific fun.
Back to back tours in May
This year, I am leading two back to back tours to England-Wales-Ireland including time in London at the Chelsea Flower Show. And in September, I will be taking another group to South Africa to see the spectacular floral landscape of the Namaqualand area, north of Cape Town.
Next year, I have more tours planned. People always love to come with me to England to see great gardens and visit the Chelsea Flower Show. It is always a magnificent time. So I suspect I will be doing that again.
But we have some very exciting exotic tours planned, too. So stay tuned.
These tours usually sell out very quickly. The English ones were gone in two days with more than 60 people signing up immediately, creating two tours. That is now topped out at 35 people per tour.
Advanced notification
To be sure of hearing about tours before everyone else, you need to have your name on our “advance notification list”. This is a list of people who have travelled with us before and also people who very much don’t want to miss out when the next tour is announced.
You can get your name on this list simply by sending details to my wife, Loraine, at lwhysall@shaw.ca. She keeps a very current list – much better than I would do.
When I am leading a tour, I always blog about what we are doing each day and post photos. You can follow along with us on all the tour this year as I will be posting stories each day here on this website. You will find them all compiled under the TOURS icon, too.
