April’s meeting took the form of an overnight trip to Antalya to look at landscaping schemes in three luxury hotels and then, of course, indulge in a small plant buying spree.

We were guided around the hotel gardens by Özge who works for Eksper, the plant sales and landscaping company who had got permission for us to visit the hotels.

The three hotels were in Lara and we started with the Batur Resort and Spa which occupies no less than 12 hectares and features luxurious lawns alongside interesting planting.

We were impressed that Metin, the man in charge of the gardens, actually labels all the plants in Latin and Turkish.

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Unfortunately he had just had the grass cut right down and all lawns aerated prior to our visit so, instead of rolling green expanses, we saw large brown spaces.

But it doesn’t take much imagination to see what it will be like in a month or so when regular watering is underway and the grass is lush and green once more.
 
The entire garden is looked after by 12 gardeners – one per hectare.  Rather them than us we thought.

Everywhere was neat as a pin and would clearly be very colourful in a few weeks’ time: bougainvillea used for hedging, potinia clipped in some places and in others allowed to grow tall, strelitzia nicholae in flower and its commoner relative strelitzia regina also blooming in sheltered spots all over the grounds.

In the next episode we’ll show and tell all about the other two hotels we visited.