Each month we will be featuring a guest writer and this month's is David Stuart.

David was for many years garden columnist for 'The Scotsman' newspaper, but for the last two years has been writing every week for the 'Ecosse' section of 'The Sunday Times', one of the UK's most prestigious weekly papers. His new book 'Gardening with Antique Plants' has just appeared in Europe, and will soon be published in N. America.

He is vastly interested in the web possibilties of gardens and gardens sites, and looks forward to further developing his site. When not on the web, he gardens in the Scottish borders, where he grows a collection of bulbs (he did a doctorate on species of Muscari at Edinburgh University), and until recently owned a nursery specialising in 'heritage' garden plants.

He also works as a garden designer and consultant, as a garden photographer, and pictures and text regularly appear in his own books, and several magazines.

We hope David will start doing a monthly column next month for Scottish Radiance.

What sort of garden do you dream of? When, sitting on the bench on a warm afternoon, or dozing by the fire, the book slipping from your hand, and the garden white with rime beyond the window... What happens? Does the view of the fence and the neighbouring houses turn into a series of decorative theatre 'flats' that gently slide sideways into the wings? What new backdrop, instead of the sand-pit, the shed, the nearby tenement, unfurls? Boskage, a view of a lake and a distant temple, or an avenue, a perfect allotment, or a jungle-girt waterfall, scattered with orchids? Or somewhere, amongst the hollyhocks or flowering prunuses, you and you significant other (or others), discuss poetry or fine wines or fast cars.

Of course, all gardening is a sort of dreaming, and all sorts of people, in all centuries, have been good at it. It's not just the landed (even not so landed), English. The gift has landed on teamasters and Zen experts of ancient Japan, on Mughal emperors and Lancashire mill operators, or French bankers in the seventeenth century, and on Italian aristocrats in the sixteenth. Funny how it comes and goes.

So, what's yours? Are they big dreams or small dreams, achievable without, that is, a lottery win or doing something clever with futures? Have you a dream space that you'd like to garden (say the little stream-filled valley in Devon with ancient mill cottage, or the Gothic cloister in Amalfi)? Do you dream of growing your vegetables properly, or having a nice display of delphiniums this year, or planting up the patio as you can see it in your mind's eye (or the photograph of the one at Vann House), with hellebores and euphorbias, and a clematis by the seat...

Well, do it. Or if that's not possisble, why not visit dream gardens this year? Several tour companies specialise in visiting Scottish gardens, and Scotlands Gardens Scheme organises trips too (there's an interesting one to Perthshire gardens from 23rd - 28th June; contact them at 31 Castle Terrace, Edinburgh EH1 2EL), or, at the very least, order a copy of this year's 'Scotlands Gardens Scheme' booklet, for pounds 3.25, including postage.

However, while we do have many splendid gardens up here, there's a streak in the Scottish character that's instinctively against garden reveries. While there are Italian terraces on dreich hillsides and windswept islands, even a tiny ruined Persian garden in a borders glen, for serious dream gardens, you need to head south, or west, or east.

The English are, in truth, better at dream gardens than we are. Never-never land seems to suit the temperament, whether at the strange drum-shaped house at Ickworth, where its wings rise from a sea of spiny acanthus, or the stranger Chinese dream-garden, all laquered pavilions and gilded dragons at Biddulph Grange. In Dorset, visit the astonishing (and marvellous) controlled formal layout of Athelhampton, where the ancient manor sits in a 19th century dream of fountains and topiary and grand gateways, or, if in Yorkshire, try Studley Royal, where the dream really is 18th century (and one of the beautiful places of the globe), or, in Lancashire, Moseley Old Hall (where there's a 1950'd dream of a parterre beyond the sixteenth century mullions). Or even Vann, where your patio is, or The Heath (in suburban Leeds), where the delphinium still reaches its apotheosis, or even Graham Stuart Thomas' dreamy little rose garden at Shugborough.

If you plan not to stray beyond the British shore, you can visit fantasies of China, Japan, Iran, India (have a look at the astonishing Sezincote in Gloucestershire, now regularly open), France, Italy, the Netherlands, America, and strange locations combining bits of each of those, and at most epochs.

If you want to visit gardens, and want most of the hard work done for you, then take one of the increasing number of garden holidays, that can be as close to home as the British regions (gardens of Devon and Cornwall are the first regions to be worth seeing), or one of the wonderful exotics, like 'Gardens of India', or 'Gardens of Japan'. But even intermediates like France, Spain or Italy can be thrilling and packed with ideas, even though 'great' gardens are mosly associatied with great wealth too.

If you use a tour operator, you will quite often get access to gardens not normally open to the public, which can be both fun and interesting. However, if you want to visit a garden-rich area, say the Loire valley, or Tuscany, there's probably enough to see that is officially open to keep you exhausted for the entire holiday, so that's perhaps not an enormous advantage.

You might prefer, gardens being so much a trick of the light, needing to be visited early or late in the day, to stay nearby, or even in, the gardens of choice. Then when it looks perfect for Stowe, or Hidcote, or Het Loo, or Vaux-le-Vicomte, all you have to do is go (avoiding crowds too). The Landmark Trust, Shottesbrooke, Maidenhead, Berks SL6 3SW Tel: 0628 82 5925, has a number of properties in or near great gardens, and the National Trusts (a lot cheaper),have many almost comparable properties.

There are several exellent house-letters in France (including companies like Vacance in Campagne, Bignor, Pulborough, West Susssex RH20 1QD), and in the north, there are immense riches, even beyond the great theoretical gardens (and their modern copies), of Le Notre. Even those have to be seen to be believed; they have to be seen because though photographs can show individual scenes, they give no idea of the immensity and theatricality of the spaces, and how it feels to move around them.

Wonders like Vaux-le-Vicomte can look vast and soul-less on the page, but is one of those great gardening experieneces in real life, and the sumptuous descent to the main cross-axis of the hidden canal, a tremendous coup-de-theatre. But there are tiny things too, like the Chateau de Brecy, and endless small private gardens along the length of the Loire, around Paris, and in Brittany, which can occupy you for several weeks. Strangest of all, perhaps, is the amazing Desert de Retz, most serene is (also perhaps) Courance, a dream of this century overlying one purportedly by the great Le Notre, but a dream in all senses.

In Italy, where to go if you have to choose? Well, the area around Rome, generally Lazio, is especially rich, as might be expected. Apart from the Villa Lante, you could also visit the strange Sacro Bosco, with the villas Orsini and the better known Bomarzo, where strange allegorical buildings and sculpture adorn the scene, or the magical Villa d'Este, with astonishing waterworks to make you lust after your own river to play with, and make you crunch your own pool fountain motor beneath your heel. And, should you get bored with gardens like the ones at Villa Madama, designed by Raphael, have a look at the enchanting Giardino di Ninfa, a modern plantsmans' garden set amongst medieval ruins. It has over 10000 species of plants.

Slightly later, and often rather more domestic in scale, try the rich areas of Tuscany and the Veneto - from the tiny hanging garden of Palazzo Picolomini, with its astonishing views, to moderns like Villa i Tati.

But Spain, with its Moorish gardens, and the wonderful fakes like the Generalife, or Germany, or Russia. All have wonders. But you're going to America instead? Well, it's big, but when in Pensilvania, hunt for the entrancing Meadowbank Farm, or Longwood, though if in Florida, don't miss the wild extravagances, based on Renaissance ideas, at Vizcaya. Though for equal expense, try Biltmore House in North Carolina. There are also nice things at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, designed by Beatrix Farrand, and if you must have modern planting and layout, try PepsiCo Park, in New York.

Further south, a dilemma persists. In Central and South America, home of a great series of gardening civilisations, which has had, and still has, immense impact all over the globe (and to which we owe tomatoes, potatoes, sweet corn, many squashes and pumpkins, tobacco, sunflowers, nasturtiums and many other food crops, and to whose landmass we owe huge numbers of garden species), there is virtually nothing left to tell us much about how the gardens looked.

But there are modern gardens there, though little information reaches into Euro-garden thought; much, that is, beyond the gardens style of Roberto Burle Marx and Luis Barragan. Of the former, the most convincing example is his own garden and plant collection, now owned by the Brazilian State at Santo Antonio da Bica, 45km from Rio de Janeiro. Most of Barragan's gardens have vanished into neglect or their original jungle.

But if you take another direction, you reach fabulous East, and another of the great garden strands in the evolution of our own gardening. While in France and Italy, from the Renaissaince, great formal gardens were being built, wonderful things were being constructed by the Mughal emperoros in Iran and northern India. If you happen to be in Kashmir, visit Shalamar Bagh and Nishat Bagh, with their flower and water-filled terraces stepping down the hillside, or the green still waters of Achabal.

And further east, in China... Ah, China: source of a myriad species treasured in Western gardens, and of a myriad garden plants too - paeonies, chrysanthemums, camellias, bamboos, hostas. And Moon gates, pagodas, vastly influential in design terms, too, for the British garden dreamer since the 18th century. But to visit now, the gardens of Beijing are the most obvious ones - but if you get the opportunity to go (lucky you), try to get to the ancient city of Suzhou (Suchow), the Venice of China, but far older, being a garden city since at least the eleventh century AD. It's filled with canals and exquisite gardens (restorations and recreations, of course, but close to originals.

There, 'harmonious stillness', is one of the most sought-after garden dreasm in spite of the extraordinary riches of the Chinese flora. How, here, we should still try for that today, where colour saturation seems to be the aim, where spring and summer are the only garden season, and winter is ignored and hated. In China, the ice on the pine needles is as much a subject for admiration as the colour of an azalea... But the Chinese culture is subtler and stranger to us than we think, so some visitors might find a few of the Chinese rock gardens hard to take.

They will be more attuned to Japan, where Europeans commonly most admire the strage, dry, Zen gardens of Kyoto. Yet those, though thrilling and often copied (badly, on the whole), and still very influential in the West, are only part of that countries immensely long and varied garden traditions. One of the first Japanese garden treatises dates from the eleventh century, and reflects an already ancient tradition, for sacred gardens had already a history of a thousand years.

Yet Kyoto itself presents many sorts of garden, and in bewildering quantities, from tranquil 'tea gardens', green with moss, and shaded with ferns and bamboo, and best seen in the evening, with stone lanterns lit, and the sound of water, to landscpae gardens, oddly busy to the Western eye, but comparable in many ways to the sentimental gardens of 18th century Britain, where constructed 'views' were meant to bring literary or sentimental notions to mind... Dreams indeed.

Copyright 1996 David Stuart

You can contact him at David Stuart.

(You will find more articles by guest writers in the Archives.)