Exquisite Exbury Gardens in Southampton, Southampton, England

I was like a child in a sweet shop, running from one glorious bloom to another, camera snapping frantically. Exbury Gardens in the New Forest was welcoming the spring with a fantastic display of magnolias, camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas. Magnolias are my favourite. The first magnolia was brought to Britain in 1688 by a missionary from America. This sparked a lot of interest in the magnolia and by 1800 most of the American species were being cultivated here. The magnolia is also an indigenous plant of Asia. The most significant introductions of these species occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century due to the activities of two famous plant collectors George Forrest and Ernest Henry Wilson. George Forrest was sent by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh to collect plant specimens in Asia. Of the thousands of plants, he collected eight were magnolias and three of the species were unknown in England. Ernest Henry Wilson introduced eight new species of the magnolia to the UK making him the most successful magnolia hunter of all time.

I strolled along the Camellia Walks occasionally coming across small clearings with benches to sit on and a sprinkling of primroses in the grass around them. The original Camellia Walk was planted during the 1930s and includes many Exbury hybrids such as camellia Charlotte de Rothschild, named for a prominent member of the famous Rothschild banking family that own the gardens. The New Camellia Walk was created in 1996 using lots of American hybrids, for example, camellia Bob Hope. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).