Earlier this month we were looking out of our hotel window, watching a cormorant fishing in St Mawes’ harbour. We were there for a quick break to enjoy the local seafood. Just five months before we had enjoyed this same view during a slightly longer stay to enable us to visit the famed gardens around Falmouth, in particular Trebah. We had long wished to visit Trebah in early Spring, but in previous years the season has shot by before we’ve remembered, but this year we were actually in southwest Cornwall at the right time. So, on a bright sunny morning, I dictated our destination into the satnav and off we set; out of St Mawes, across the Old Harry Ferry and away.

I am always saying how important it is to consult a map before a journey so that you know where you are going and not rely on the satnav alone. In this case, the garden being a private trust and therefore not featured in our National Trust Handbook, I had consulted the Trebah website for their map. It came as a surprise, therefore, that just as the satnav was announcing our imminent arrival at Trebah, we sailed past the entrance to the National Trust’s garden of Glendurgan. As I now know, the two gardens are not only neighbours, set in separate valleys/combes, but were created at the same time at the beginning of the nineteenth century by two brothers named Fox, although later, at Trebah at least, their descendants did some significant replanting and restructuring in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

You enter Trebah’s gardens via an extensive, modern, single storey building in which the entry desk is flanked to one side by a large shop (too tempting for Elaine to ignore) and on the other by an extensive restaurant. Very non-NT, all very modern; but once in the gardens you are in another world, or perhaps just Madeira. Immediately, robins watched our every move; in a shady pool there were giant carp; and there were plants everywhere.

The combe is narrow and deep, running down to the mouth of the Helford river and the vegetation is exuberant, The gardens occupy some 26 acres and there are claimed to be 4 miles of paths. In early April the camellias, rhododendrons and magnolias were all in full flower and seemed to pile into one another, even the more low-growing vegetation looked tropical. We took the higher path so that we could look down on to the canopies of flowering trees and shrubs below, whilst being surrounded by others just as beautiful. The depth of the combe blocked out the fresh breeze that had been blowing in St Mawes. As the valley reaches the sea, there is an arched bridge and a pool created in tribute to Monet’s garden at Giverny. We were enchanted.

In Slapton we know all about microclimates. One part of the village can feel very different from another, especially if a wind is blowing, even without venturing near to the sea. In the same way, Glendurgan garden has a very different feel to Trebah. Instead of a deep combe, it consists of three separate valleys which join as they head towards the Helford Estuary. The garden is much wider and more open and, though full of exotic plants in full flower when we visited, we did not feel transported to some remote paradise in a land far, far away, but to a beautiful garden in Cornwall. We were more aware of the outside world, nuthatches called in the trees above and the breeze came in off the sea.

The entrance into the valley from the sea is much wider than at Trebah, with a sandy beach and the little old fishing village of Durgan. The Fox family at

Glendurgan built a small school within the gardens, apparently to educate not only their own children but also those from the village. Thus, there was no obvious attempt to build an exclusive paradise for the family and their guests as there may have been at Trebah. Near to the tiny school is a children’s play area and, in a wider part of the valley, close to the sea, a large maze, apparently also meant to entertain their children. They had twelve. Thus, with all those children, the village and the staff required to run the house and maintain and plant the garden, and the call of the birds in the trees, Glendurgan must have been full of energy and movement, but still surrounded by natural beauty.

If you want to visit a magnificent garden built in a combe leading down to the sea, albeit terminating not in a beach but a cliff top with a possible chance glimpse of a peregrine, you don’t have to travel to Cornwall. We have Coleton Fishacre close by. A garden I can never visit too often.