Taking time to smell the roses.

A few years ago, I did myself a seriously good deed – one that fed the soul. I stopped to smell the roses.

Growing up, I was one of those kids whose bedroom walls were plastered with pictures, posters and cut outs from magazines, literally hundreds of them. But unlike other kids, mine were not of pop stars, movie stars, dolphins or horses.
My walls were adorned with pictures of African animals, flowers and most dominant were the pictures of English country gardens. The latter I get to blame on our lovely old English landlady. She used to get multiple sets of calendars every year, with images to remind her of home, at the end of the year she passed them on to me. Those lovely scenes of foxgloves or daffodils, or sweet country cottages peeking out beneath a huge fuchsia bush, that’s what I imprinted on myself. I always thought those kind of lush, colourful gardens were a thing only attainable in that faraway mythical place called England, boy was I mistaken.

Every year Ludwig’s Roses puts together a rose bus tour, to visit some of the top private gardens in South Africa. It’s a chance to see behind the walls of some of the lushest, most beautiful gardens in the land. If I’m not mistaken they do an international tour too…. maybe one day when I’m big. When I heard about a “rose bus tour” done by our South African rose man himself Ludwig Taschner, hesitation was not a problem. This had to be seen and experienced.
Arriving at Ludwig’s Soleil I thought maybe I’d got the date all messed up, and they had some special senior citizen function on. But actually it just turns out that the older generation are the gardeners, I was the one out of place. I hopped onto one of the buses waiting in the parking lot, strategically planting myself close to the front and off we set on a day full of colour and saturation.

In the course of the day, they took us to five of the most beautiful gardens I’ve ever seen, some of them straight out of fairy tales. From larney town houses to lovely family homes in the suburbs. Each garden had something different and special to offer.

Visiting any one of Ludwig’s rose centers is a superb experience in itself, but going on a tour and seeing the roses planted out in someone’s fairy tale garden, that’s the best experience.
There is a Joburg tour coming up on the 18th of October, for any one of my interested readers. More info here.