I was on my winter wonderland holiday in Canada and being the garden designer and horticulturalist that I am, I could not pass through Vancouver without popping into the Botanical Gardens to see what they had to offer.
It was a grey day in December so I was lucky enough to have the gardens mostly to myself and therefore managed to glimpse a few of the garden's inhabitants as I wondered quietly around.
Winter colour is something easily overlooked when planting a garden but here I found renewed enthusiasm for stem colour. The Rubus cockburnianus with its snowy white stems looks beautiful against the darker reds of the Cornus.
Sculpture and structure take on a new, almost spiritual appearance in winter.
A festival of lights changed the mood of the gardens closer by the visitor centre into an enchanting and fun filled landscape.
