A couple of weekends ago I enjoyed a Saturday wandering around other peoples’ gardens. Don’t worry, I didn’t just hop over some fences uninvited. The event was the Fall Garden Tour sponsored in our area by the local chapter of the American Association of University Women as a benefit for its scholarship program. I never pass up the opportunity to see how experienced gardeners develop their landscapes, using plants, garden art and hardscape to transform a bare plot of ground into a relaxing and beautiful space. Each of the six gardens visited provided inspiration and ideas for my own yard, and each was unique in the challenges its site brought to its owners and reflected their personalities and interests. Some were in well-established neighborhoods with mature trees and shrubs which sheltered shade gardens — a lovely respite on this warm day. Most included water features: gurgling fountains, ponds with a few goldfish swimming about, small streams tumbling over rocks. The most impressive garden boasted a 20-by-30-foot pond fed by a towering waterfall, which ably masked the street noise of a nearby busy intersection. Most gardens also included a sizable vegetable garden along with all kinds of annual and perennial flowers and shrubs and fruit trees. I like to see how edibles and ornamentals planted side by side create an eye-pleasing and table-filling display, making the best use of available space. Two gardens sat amid sizable acreage on the west side of town, where suburban neighborhoods give way to rolling hills, pastures, orchards and vineyards. Here, at the last garden we visited, one could see the owner’s travels clearly incorporated into her garden and home. On entering, one encounters a beautifully carved wooden door featuring the Hindu god Ganesh, and scattered about are manifestations of Buddha and other art collected during the owner’s 15 years in Southern India. She told me she also includes plants from that country in every garden she nurtures, pointing out a “drumstick tree” and a curry plant to me. It made me realize that this is another reason I like to wander other peoples’ gardens: They recall for me my own travels and the gardens and plants I have seen in foreign lands. Clusters of euphorbia (spurge) instantly transport me to the Isle of Capri, where we took the chair lift to the top of Monte Solaro. Far below our dangling feet were terraced gardens, thickly interplanted with grapevines trellised above squash and melon vines, tomatoes and beans. Growing wild farther up the mountainside among the tumbling stone were large shrubs of euphorbia, hardy in those rocky, dry conditions. Their relatives now grow in my rockery, where they grow equally well with similar neglect. Whenever I spot the bronzy spikes of New Zealand flax, I immediately recall the enormous specimens I spotted roadside during my trip to New Zealand. Even a pot of geraniums calls up the image of an enormous shrub of bright red blooms I spotted growing in front of a cottage on Crete, and the lantana planted annually here recalls the way it scrambles wild over the roadside ditches throughout the Mediterranean. This love of growing things and the natural world provides me with great pleasure in my own backyard, at the same time providing me with a portal to the entire planet. I can incorporate a world of plants into my own patch of earth and transport myself to those places I’ve visited and loved. Yes, the world is my garden, and my garden brings the world to me. — Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor