Ole Dam Mikkelsen has made this magnificent garden in Barbados from an abandoned sugar cane field in just 33 years. It is full of huge trees, orchids, cacti and palms - only in the tropics can trees this size reach maturity in such a short time.
The tree on the left I was told is a coolie nut tree from Brazil. I've tried to look it up without success.
I hope you will bear with me in my ignorance of most of the plants in this garden. It is extraordinarily difficult to find the names of plants just by googling "tropical plant with stripey leaves" for example, or "tree with spikey bark from Barbados". The flower above is called Cat's whiskers but I've no idea what the Latin name is.
This one, Hura crepitans, is known locally as the sandbox tree, monkey no climb and also the dynamite tree (the sound the fruit makes when it splits). The sap has been used to poison fish and the unripe seeds were sawn in half to make sandboxes for pens.
One of the main features of this garden was the variety of trees. This one, I have found, is the Silk Tassle Tree.
This tree featured on a Gardener's World programme recently but I can't find the episode to get the name.
However, even I could identify tiny mangoes.
And breadfruit, although I've still never eaten one. Breadfruit trees (Artocarpus altilis) were brought to the Caribbean by Captain Bligh from the South Pacific for the express purpose of feeding slaves. It is one of the highest yielding fruit trees, producing up to 150 fruits a year, each weighing up to 6kg. Nutritionally it is still an important food, high in vitamins C and B3, potassium and omegas 3 and 6.
What on earth is this? There was a row of them, each about 10m tall.
And these are the roots of a large fig tree, looking like a box of snakes.
The foliage, mostly evergreen, is pretty spectacular as well.
Not always very friendly, unusual for Barbados.
The flowers are vivid in colour and dramatic in form. This is Adenium obesum, known as the desert rose in Barbados, although it is thought to have come from East Africa originally. It flowers in the dry season (winter in Barbados) when most of the leaves drop off, leaving just these flourescent flowers on display.
Here are the stripey leaves. I doubt I would plant this in a garden in the UK but here it looks fab.
This is some sort of semperviven, or maybe an aloe..
Now, where's that rum punch?
