Getting down and dirty

DEPARTURE LOUNGE: Susan Kurosawa | October 11, 2008 GARDENING is the new sex, they say, or is it the new black? Whatever the phrase du jour, we do know that so-called trowel tourism is all the go and horticultural tours to the world's best-planted reaches are fabulously successful. It's not just the great estates of Europe that feature on such itineraries. Plantsmen and women are off in their sturdy droves viewing raked-pebble gardens in Japan, with their ineffable symbolism and not a grain out of place, and Chinese affairs that look freshly lifted from willow pattern plates but with the bonus of a full colour palette and, I like to fancy, a celestial nightingale or three twittering away. There is rather a lot of garden content in this issue of Travel & Indulgence, in fact, which surely is a good thing. We have old Sydney's... [read full story]