New this year are maps, marking the gardens in each area, which is a huge bonus.This is a directory, rather than a guide. Entries are written by the owners themselves, and I confess I am always drawn to gardens that sound slightly ramshackle and chaotic, rather than to those whose owners are sure beyond any reasonable doubt that their creations “will give inspiration to anyone wishing to develop a similar plot”. As the visitor, I feel that inspiration-quotient should be my decision, not theirs The range of gardens is extraordinary. Tomorrow you could visit the Shorts’ garden at Longthatch, Warnford, in Hampshire which has part of the national collection of hellebores (open 2pm-5pm, admission pounds 2). Engelberg is full of ski rental shops, and our driver dropped us at the wrong one. No one seemed surprised.We had to leave by 4.30pm, to get the Manchester passengers back for their flight.

By now it was after midday; so much for the six hours in the resort that we had been promised. When we reached the resort, we were to be dropped off at the ski rental shop, where we were to pick up a lift pass, a map and our equipment – all included in the price of the tour. It is richly evocative and knowledgeable, and highlights places that no visitor could find on his own. Even if the prospect of a visit to Dominica is as unlikely as a kind word from your bank manager, this is a must-have book. It explains how French gardening traditions were followed by English practices, and how they in turn were overlaid by the crops and growing skills of the entrepreneurial black Africans. Many were brought to Dominica to work as slaves on the 18th-century sugar plantations.All this is part of our gardening history, too. It tells of the successive waves of colonisers who drove the indigenous Caribs, growers of cassava, sweet potato and soursop, into the remoter areas of the island.

But the introduction does much more: it gives a historic perspective to the way the island is gardened. That’s because the guide itself is so sympathetically and vividly written by Polly Pattullo, a specialist in Caribbean affairs, and Anne Jno Baptiste, an American-born Dominican who has a beautiful garden at the Papillote Wilderness Retreat in Dominica.This is the first guide to the gardens of the island and, as you’d expect, it tells you where to go, what you’ll see and how to get there. In the matrix of its roots, bromeliads could get a hold, but the fern was always trying to swamp the newcomers.Reading a newly published guide, The Gardens of Dominica (Papillote Press, pounds 7.99), I felt desperately homesick. The chief culprit was a graceful fern that grew wild over all the cooler, damper parts of the island. The skim of soil was too precious to dislodge, too vulnerable to expose to the torrential thunderstorms.

Each hanging rope of flowers had its own attendant hummingbird.Even the simplest tasks were different there Weeding involved not pulling but cutting. Where we might use wisteria, along the front of the verandah, there was a jade vine with three-foot racemes of flowers in an improbable shade of turquoise. Some looked like huge insects: flattened, fleshy cockroaches, or a preying mantis leering out of a nest of leaves. Others were planted on the ground, between tall stands of anthuriums and arrow-leaved aroids. Many were in flower: startling spikes of coral and purple, or shocking pink and mauve. The camellia’s flowers, which to us seem so theatrical, were upstaged. Bent under the weight of the orchids growing on its mossy branches, it was a soprano trilling a solitary lieder while everything else was thundering in a Wagnerian chorus.
Bromeliads were the boss plants in this garden Some grew along the branches of the old grapefruit trees.

I was cutting down ferns and morning glories that I would have been fussing over as if they were babies, if ever I could have persuaded them to grow at home. Looking out over that garden, only two plants were familiar: a buddleia (an object of great curiosity in Dominica) and a camellia, both in bloom. Like an artist or musician, he does not imitate nature, but seeks to capture its mysterious and transcendental spirit.. On holiday in the Windward Islands a few years ago, I spent a day weeding amongst orchids and bromeliads on an old grapefruit plantation high in the centre of Dominica “Weeding” here took on a different character. Within the groups, stones must be of a different size but be in harmony with one another.Whatever the arrangement or materials that are used, the traditional Japanese garden designer, the niwashi, aims to create a mood of tranquillity called yugen. If, for example, you have three stones to arrange, then you should make a group of two and one. In general, stones should always be arranged in groups of odd numbers, unless you are making a group of two.