Marvelling at Madeira’s natural bounty
We are in Madeira, walking in Ina’s footsteps. It has been near a year now since she died and we arrive on her birthday. Henri’s follows just a few days later.
She wanted to mark the week visiting her mother’s favourite island. Ina had been here a few times in the past few years. It is easy to understand why.
We are surrounded by coral trees, others new to me. Gardens are a mishmash of colour, full-blown bloom to seedlings bursting through. It seems everything finds a home in this rich red earth.
We cable car high over a run of allotments and I suffer serious soil envy. Umber crumb splattered with rich green leaf. Verdant young vegetables two to three months ahead of the UK. Plots are carved out of tumbling hills. Terracing built into steep sides like tea plantations.
Carnival week has just closed, but flower dealers selling exotic rooted plants are dotted everywhere. Food market stalls have walls of seed packets like I’ve never seen. Maybe 20 varieties each of beans and tomatoes.
I pride myself that I succumb to just four flower packets: two each of shasta daisy (Leucanthemum Maximum) and nasturtium, called capuchina here. Where they’ll grow we’ll worry about later. There are acres of nasturium tumbling down the hillsides, green-leaf cover, maybe my favourite orange and lemon flower. I pick roadside tagetes seed heads. All intensely comforting.
It’s monarch season. Tiger-striped caterpillars stripping the swan plants, more commonly known as bishop’s balls, for obvious reasons. Butterflies flutter by.
On our last day, we hike in the mountains and it’s here the island’s full majesty is revealed. We look out over cloud-hugging slopes to the sea, past the water cascading through rocks, through dying trees colonised by fern, other dead branches smothered in ethereal moss.
Madeira: a gardener’s wonderland. It’s easy to see why Ina kept coming back.
Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £9.99) is out now. Order it for £8.49 from guardianbookshop.com
