When it comes to actually telling you what the flowers are my inner florist leaps off a cliff and dashes itself on the rocks below leaving me to simply say things like “It’s yellowish”. I’ve never paid much attention to their names and can tell a daisy from a rose and not much else. But, that doesn’t mean they don’t look any less pretty when you take pictures of them.

After a quick stop for something to eat and a few drinks we set off instead for the botanic gardens. This took us along Oxford’s High Street and past architecture quite typical for the area. Several colleges and University Church of St Mary the Virgin were among the landmarks that we strolled past.

The Oxford Botanic Garden was founded in 1621 as a physic garden – a garden for growing herbs for use in medicinal research – and today houses over five thousand species of flowers and plants. Situated along the banks of the River Cherwell – where people could be seen punting along it with varying degrees of success – it is broadly arranged in three sections: the Glasshouses, the Lower Garden, and the Walled Garden.

We started our wander through the garden with the Glasshouses. Numerous climate zones were represented in the occasionally cramped and very warm spaces here: a cloud forest, a water lily pond, a rainforest, a carnivorous plants house, and an arid zone for cactuses. Each had its appeal, but I’m always drawn to pitcher plants for some reason. It’s because I was a fly in a previous life.

We’re not botanists and our knowledge of flowers in general is extremely small, but the plants on show were attractive, some were clearly exotic and not native to these shores, and, ultimately, when it comes to nature, you either like it or you don’t. I won’t pretend to try to determine what each plant was, but if you’ve got an interest in flowers or what sorts of plants grow in different climates then it’s a great way to spend an hour or two.

It was good to get outside and into some fresh air after exploring the Glasshouses; as I mentioned, they could be a little cramped with a sensible one-way system of exploring their interior spaces that was only mostly observed by people visiting on the same day that we were there. The outside garden spaces were more typical of what you’d find in any English estate, but there were areas given over to medicinal herbs still among rare plants too.

One other area of the Walled Garden was the literary walk. It is known that authors such as Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien visited Oxford Botanic Garden, and if you’re a fan of the His Dark Materials books by Philip Pullman or its TV adaptation then the bench that Will and Lyra pledge to sit on at noon each Midsummer’s Day in their respective worlds is located in the garden too, and quite likely smothered with other fans at that time if you’re thinking it might be nice to pop along there and do so as well.

That ended up being enough of Oxford’s cultural and historical elements for one day for us, and we would spend the rest of this day visiting some pubs. What can I say? We like pubs.

If you’ve read the previous two posts in this particular series then you might just be expecting some photos of the Icelandic landscape as seen from the bus as we travelled between stops, and I’m feeling in the sort of mood where I don’t want to disappoint you, so here, to start with, have some more.

We particularly liked the views up the fjord as we crossed over it just to the north of the airport, getting a great look at our ship, Sky Princess, and also the Silverseas ship, Silver Whisper. The difference in sizes between the two ships, the low-lying town, then the flat-topped mountain range, all combined to form something incredibly pleasing to the eye. I understand that not everyone likes the look of cruise ships, particularly against nature’s backdrops, but the important thing to remember here is that this site and its owner does, so tough titties.

Akureyri Botanical Garden opened to the public in 1912 following the founding of a park association a couple of years earlier and the granting of some land for use. Located towards the southern end of the long Eyjafjörður, the area is protected from the worst extremes of weather and temperature, and it therefore provides a good microclimate in which to grow not just local flora typical of the latitude just outside the Arctic Circle, but also more temperate varieties and mountain varieties of plant-life too. Of the approximately seven thousand types of plants grown in the garden, the overwhelming majority – around six thousand, six hundred – are not native species.

Should you wish to visit Akureyri Botanical Garden, then it’s open and free to enter from June until the end of September. It’s not a long walk from the centre of town, but it will involve a little bit of an uphill stroll towards the end as the garden is in an elevated position which does provide for a few nice views outside its boundaries.

Our visit to the garden was unsupervised but we were given some guidance about the best route to take as well as the time to meet back at the bus. There were some groans as this information was imparted because we weren’t given very long to explore at all. We accept that if you’re on a tour then you can’t please everyone – some people may have had no interest at all in the botanical garden, for instance, and considered what time we had there excessive – but with our ship not due to leave for several hours this felt like too short a period for no good reason. In fact, had we properly realised how close the town was we might have asked to make our own way back on foot, but you know how it is: first time in a town in a foreign country and you don’t want to be that person who has to phone the captain and cry because you’re lost and you’ve heard there are trolls.

I can’t really tell you much about the flowers, bushes, shrubs, or trees in Akureyi Botanical Garden because when it comes to this part of nature I’m more a know-what-I-like person than a know-what-I’m-looking-at person. I know that I liked the flowers in the garden.

We met back at the bus at the time we’d been told to meet back at the bus, as did almost everyone else. Almost everyone else. Two women clearly agreed with the majority of people that they’d not been given nearly enough time to see what they wanted to see, but differed in that they reasoned the bus and everyone else would simply have to wait for them rather than giving any consideration to fellow tour passengers. Did they apologise as they boarded the bus nearly ten minutes late? Did they fuck.

In the next part of this cruise travelogue series I’ll cover some photos from around the waterfront area of Akureyri as we still had plenty of time after the excursion to take a walk around. But did we also find a pub in which to have a drink? That’s the question!

One small word of warning or advice, though: Gothenburg has two notable gardens pandering to the likes of those with botanical leanings and the Garden Society is the smaller of the two and the closer to the city centre (and therefore more easily-walkable-to which is why we headed there). The Gothenburg Botanical Garden is significantly larger but a little further south in Gothenburg. If you’re super-keen about flowers and plants then you’ll likely want to visit both.

Our walk through and look around the Garden Society of Gothenburg wasn’t born from a love of flora but rather it was something that was clearly other than just streets roughly on the way to another destination in the city we had in mind to visit. My personal knowledge of plant-life is small enough to write on the petal of a daisy and wouldn’t extend to much more than “I think this is the petal of a daisy” but parks and gardens are pleasing to wander around no matter what.

If you visit the Garden Society of Gothenburg you’ll find it impossible to miss the Palm House. Dating from 1878 and inspired by London’s Crystal Palace but to a slightly less grand scale, it still remains a gorgeous sight and is clearly a product of the industrial revolution, utilising large frames of iron and thousands of panes of glass.

The interior of the Palm House is split into five sections, each with different climates, but tropical heat and humidity is what greets you first. And in addition to greeting you it greets your camera which has been outside in the cool air of the Swedish city, and so your camera lens keeps misting up. Which means you keep having to wipe the lens and take a photo and hope that you’ve wiped without smearing too much and not given the lens surface enough time to fog over again.

Obviously, yes, you could simply be patient and wait until your equipment warms to the same as the ambient temperature in the greenhouse. But who has time for that? Anyway, that’s why some of the photos look a little smudgy. In fact I had better pictures from my phone in here (although I used it less often) simply because the phone was already effectively warmed up by being in my pocket.

There were some nice, exotic flowers on display but other than recognising pitcher plants, I couldn’t tell you what anything was.

In the largest section of the Palm House it was possible to climb steps to an upper platform where some tables and chairs were set out and locals were sitting around with food and drinks, chatting, and generally appreciating being inside.

Back outside, we continued our walk through the Garden Society of Gothenburg towards its south western exit because it was roughly to the south that we wanted to head next.

There’s not a lot to do in the Garden Society of Gothenburg other than enjoy the gardens and plants and flowers, but if enjoying gardens and plants and flowers is something you like then with its close proximity to the main part of Gothenburg it’s a free activity that’s clearly going to be worth your while.

In the next post in this 2022 Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll visit the Universeum in Gothenburg because we’d seen it combined science, zoo, and aquarium all in one place, and we like all those things.

Yes, those are the excuses for the photos to come, which aren’t too bad, all things considered, but you should see the ones I rejected.

When we visited Clandon Park in 2007 it’s my recollection that photography wasn’t permitted inside the house, hence no pictures. That was pretty typical of all National Trust houses we visited back then although in subsequent years this restriction seems to have been sensibly lifted, likely in line with a reduction in people buying postcards of the rooms and the rise of social media with its free publicity opportunities.

From 2015 onwards you also wouldn’t have been able to take pictures in the house on account of the fire that gutted it, but there is work underway to restore some of it to its former glory so access will be granted again at some point in the future.

Let’s take a look at the photos I did take then of Clandon Park gardens.

We started with a look around the Hinemihi, a Maori whare, which probably doesn’t mean much to you given the low number of Maori readers of this site. A whare is a type of meeting house and this one resided in the village of Te Wairoa close to Mount Tarawera, a volcano on New Zealand’s North Island that erupted in 1886.

The whare had been built in Te Wairoa largely as a tourist experience, letting visitors to the area experience Maori culture, and the name Hinemihi was that of a sixteenth century chief known for her large pet lizard Kataore. The whare was built by locals but used a mixture of traditional and European influences in its construction making it unique in style. That most likely saved it. The resulting weight of ash from the volcanic eruption that covered the village collapsed all but a couple of buildings, with Hinemihi being one of those still standing, providing shelter to a large number of people.

In 1892 the 4th Earl of Onslow was nearing the end of his New Zealand governorship and bought the whare to have it shipped back to the family home in Clandon Park, and it is one of only a few such buildings to exist outside New Zealand.

The house we definitely looked inside even without photographic proof was largely rebuilt in the early part of the eighteenth century in the Palladian style – a very familiar type of architectural design for many National Trust properties around the country – and replaced an earlier Elizabethan mansion.

The surrounding gardens owe some of their style to well-known landscape designer Capability Brown and consisted of the formal areas and large vistas to the surrounding countryside and occasional stone sculptures you’d expect from any property of this type.

The gardens had been more-or-less untouched from their earliest layout until Brown was approached to make changes in 1781. Many formal areas further from the house were removed in favour of more open parkland, a pleasure garden was created, and a canal through the landscape was converted to a lake. Little then changed for nearly a hundred years until some of Brown’s changes were themselves removed, replacing the pleasure garden with lawn, adding in walking paths, removing some trees for views, and planting new ones to hide some aspects.

Following the return of the 4th Earl from New Zealand with his Maori meeting house in the late part of the nineteenth century there was another set of sweeping changes in Clandon Park’s gardens with more cultivation taking place and plenty of influences from home and abroad introduced along with some more informal touches embracing a more naturalistic approach. Other alterations took place after this period, including during World War II when much of the ground was given over to growing food for the war effort (the Dig For Victory campaign), but when the National Trust took over ownership of Clandon Park it was to the 4th Earl’s period that they largely tried to return the look of the land.

One thing I clearly liked from our visit to Clandon Park was the hole in the wall with views into the formal garden with quite a few shots of it, a couple of which you can see below.

Clandon Park is in Surrey and it’s worth keeping an eye on the National Trust Clandon Park web page before thinking about visiting due to ongoing restoration work at the time of writing.