Mick Hales Gardens Around the World:365 Days

By now TheGardenLady readers know, as do friends and family, that TheGardenLady loves to visit gardens and parks and nurseries in her area every season; and when she travels she loves to visit every garden she can. Because of this a friend gave me a book entitled “Mick Hales Gardens Around the World:365 Days.” One would think there would be 365 gardens in the big book of lovely photos from the gardens. But some gardens have more than one day devoted to them. Still there are about 160 gardens listed. I wonder how the author chose the gardens. Were these all the gardens he visited? Or did he just take the best of the best photos he shot and use them for the book?

Because I think that every garden I visit or have visited would show beautifully in photographs, I wouldn’t know how to eliminate some. However Mick Hales chose the photos; he said they were chosen randomly over a twenty year period.Â The book is stunning and makes one want to visit all the gardens he photographed. And for TheGardenLady it is fun to see how many of the gardens I have visited that he loved. After visiting a garden, I check to see if that garden is in the book and check it off my list of gardens just as bird watchers check off all the birds they have seen.

I know that I could never visit all the gardens in the book. For example, the book was published in 2003, yet two of the gardens, at least, are no longer in existence. I tried for years to find out where the Biesenkamp Moss Garden was in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and after all that time I have to assume that it is no longer in existence. If any reader knows about this moss garden, please let TheGardenLady know. Instead I have visited three other moss gardens. One is the Benner Moss Garden.Â The second was up for sale when I visited because the owner was getting too old. I hope some garden society was able to acquire it. And I have visited the world famous Moss Garden in Kyoto,Â which would have been included in any book on gardens that I would write (read my post on this). The other garden I wished I had visited is the Heronswood Nursery garden. The Heronswood business was sold to Burpee in Pennsylvania. Burpee has lovely show Gardens if you wish to visit.

Many of the gardens in the book are private gardens, some of them don’t tell you whose gardens they are. So unless one is lucky and gets to visit during The Garden Conservancy open garden days or with some Horticultural group, it is unlikely to get to see these gardens.

Of the listing in the directory of public gardens at the back of the book. TheGardenLady has had the pleasure of visiting about a quarter of these gardens. These gardens are highly recommended

Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, IL