Happy Valentine! Here are flowers for you…

Hello,
allow me to present here another little treat – one more photo from our upcoming book Exotic Gardens of the Eastern Caribbean. This time it is a photo showing fields of Anturium at Montreal Gardens in St Vincent. This garden is amazing, and huge fields of various types of Anturium are simply mind-blowing. Red, pink, white, cream… almost overwhelming experience.
Anturiums do really well in that climate, being high in the hills of St Vincent, with lots of mist and breeze…
I hope you will enjoy this pic as much as we do!

Looks like soon we are going for next photo trip – this time to St Lucia, Dominica, Martinique, Grenada, Barbados, Jamaica and Honduras. It will be six weeks of location work. Surely, I will post some of photos made there. Stay tuned – I will post more before our departure. Cheerrs, and Happy Valentine Day!
Derek

PS.
Here is another recent recommendation of our Tropical Homes book

Do you like Cannonball trees?

As we are progressing with our book Exotic Gardens of the Eastern Caribbean, I am posting for you two more photographs. The first one is again from Hunte’s Gardens on Barbados. We love his way of blending plants with additional elements, creating stage-like decoration for the garden.
When you step down to the bottom of the sinkhole-shaped garden, you follow a narrow path through dark area shaded by huge palm leaves. And suddenly, you enter this small secluded place inviting you to rest. Simply irresistible…

Hunte’s Gardens are full of wonderful surprises, and we will reveal many of them in our book.

Next photo I would like to share with you is from St Vincent Botanic Garden – the oldest botanic garden in the Caribbean.
Among other plants and trees, a huge and old Cannonball tree grows there, lending visitors its shade on a hot day.

It looks bizarre, full of spiky branches. But, when it starts to bloom it creates an amazing spectacle, and its flowers are most unusual. Add a light fragrance to it, and it is a tree from Eden!

It will be my pleasure to post more photographs from our upcoming garden book soon.

I would also take this opportunity to thank Waheeda Harris, a seasoned travel writer, for her nice review of our book Tropical homes of the Eastern Caribbean.

We specially like the comment on brilliant bright colour shades. Thanks so much!

Couple of new garden photos…

When we visited Barbados to do location photography for our upcoming book Exotic Gardens of the Eastern Caribbean, among many other places we visited fantastic Hunte’s Gardens. It is quite unusual garden, and one of the finest highlights of our new book. Run by Anthony Hunte, a veteran of horticulture related works, it is a marvel.
What’s really nice and different about it – he plays his favourite classical music through several outdoor speakers, creating almost surreal ambiance and unusual background for the garden visitors.

Anthony knows well how to make maximum visual impact too, and his garden will make one of the longest chapters of our new book – so many good photos, we simply couldn’t decide to not show as many as possible. He is one of main reasons for this book being rather thick, similarly to our Tropical Homes of the Eastern Caribbean book.
Photos shown in this post are not included in the book as they are here, as these are not edited as nicely as photos in our book – but they show well this unusual place. (Please keep in mind we share with you copyrighted pics, and respect that. Thanks!)
When you see these densely planted palms – would you believe this garden is only… 6 years old?

OK, have to go back to my work, still editing amazing photos from the Montreal Estate Gardens on St Vincent.
to see more on our books, visit our main site Ozone Zone Books.
Until the next one! Cheers!
Derek

Exotic Gardens of the Eastern Caribbean – our next book

Several bookstores from the Caribbean called us recently, asking about availability of our Tropical Homes of the Eastern Caribbean book. Apparently they have lots of customers already inquiring about this title on Caribbean islands. Well, a large shipment is on its way to them, and soon our first book will be available on Barbados, Grenada and possibly Bequia and St Lucia. http://www.amazon.ca/Tropical-Homes-Eastern-Caribbean-Margaret/dp/0981327907/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_2

At the same time we are working hard on our Exotic Gardens of the Eastern Caribbean book, and have most of chapters already finished. There will be close to thirty different gardens, and in this post I would like to turn your attention to one particular garden.

It is a well hidden treasure, a little known pearl of the Caribbean region located high in the mountains of St Vincent. Called Montreal Estate Gardens, it is designed and run by a legendary landscape designer from England, who spent many years restoring historic gardens in France. He is an amazingly skilled artist, but after seeing his creations we rather think of him as a master magician, a wizard who with a touch of his magic wand creates breath-taking realms like straight from an amazing dream, little pieces of Eden on Earth.

I post here a photograph from this vast garden, which in our opinion should get much more international recognition than it does. Thing is – as many artists, he is too deeply concentrated on his work to think of any commercial promotion. We hope our book will help discover this garden by many enthusiasts, photographers, and professionals from that field… Montreal estate Garden alone is worthy a special trip to the Caribbean. But, when you add to it nearby Diamond gardens on St Lucia, Hunte’s gardens, Welchman Hall Gully, or Andromeda gardens on Barbados – you can have a garden tour experience of a lifetime…

A word of thanks…

I stumbled across a blog today. It has a comment on our book, and we found it really nicely written.
I wanted to thank the author, but could not find any way of doing it there, did not see any buttons for comments, etc. (you can see I am not really good with blogs, ha ha).

So, the next best and most natural thing seems to be this post.

Une Fleur Grise – We thank you for your kind words, and your very beautiful description of our book. Words like yours are the best reward for our work and passion we put into it.
http://unefleurgrise.tumblr.com/post/367155587/in-tropical-homes-of-the-eastern-caribbean

Lets hope our paths will meet one day, and let your gray flower bloom forever.
Cheers!
Derek and Margaret