Garden Cities
Some cities are planted as much as built, their identity kept in parks, botanic gardens and green master plans. Garden cities are for travellers who measure a place by its shade.
A garden destination is a place where a designed landscape is the reason to travel, and the design is an argument about nature made with plants.
Someone made it, on purpose, over decades. Monet rented at Giverny in 1883, bought later, and spent forty-three years diverting a stream and planting by colour so that he would have subjects — around 250 water lily canvases came out of it, the last painted nearly blind from cataracts.
Maintenance is the art. These landscapes are kept to planting plans and cutting cycles, and a garden looks like itself for a few weeks a year. The portraits say which weeks.
Borrowed scenery counts. Suzhou's scholars compressed mountains, water and forest into a courtyard of a few hundred square metres by implication rather than scale, and the technique has a name.
Follies are disclosed. Where genuine antiquities were imported as ornament — Roman columns from Leptis Magna erected at Virginia Water in 1826 — the text says where they came from.
Come in the right fortnight, or come knowing you have missed it.