The Flower Scout's Travel Guide to Finding Flowers

Today for free on the Flowerlogue…When we travel, there’s a fairly non-negotiable list of flower-related stops that finds its way into our itinerary. Today’s article is light on text and heavy on images. I can’t help it! They say so much more than words. All photos by me. As usual, this email is better viewed in the Substack App.

I have an incredibly enabling husband who, despite the occasional good-natured sigh when I announce “just a quick stop,” actually enjoys coming along. These days, even he asks where the nearest botanic garden is - because he knows it usually ends with an ice cream, a stretch on the lawn, and a peek at a squirrel (his favourite), pat of a rogue cat and a quiet moment away from the traffic in whatever city we’ve landed in.

Even when we’re not travelling specifically for a flower festival or workshop or if its winter, there’s always a way to find flowers.

Before we leave, I begin researching - not with a strict itinerary, but with a loose, ever-growing list of possibilities. People often assume there must be an app that brings all of this together: flower festivals, workshops, flower farms, botanic gardens, florists, hotel installations, and seasonal highlights around the world.

I wish there were. I’ve looked. There isn’t.

So, I piece it together from a mix of sources - my own Blooming Calendar, botanic gardens, tourism websites, florist Instagram accounts, Substack newsletters, Google Maps rabbit holes, and word-of-mouth discoveries. It takes more time, but it often leads to the kinds of places I never would have found.

So from the obvious to the not:

1. First on the list are flower festivals, ideally anything within a couple of hours by train or car. Some of the best discoveries come from these small detours rather than the headline events themselves. Festival Flora in Cordoba was a last minute trip organised from Madrid. As the Festival is free to enter, all we needed were train tickets and 2 hotel nights.

   

2. Botanic gardens are always central. They’re one of the easiest ways to understand a place through its plant life. Walking through Kirstenbosch in Cape Town, I was struck by how familiar so many plants felt. Living in Perth, we share a similar Mediterranean climate, so seeing strelitzias, pelargoniums and proteas growing so freely created an unexpected sense of connection. Kew Gardens in London and Singapore Gardens by the Bay are well known ones and the Palace of Montserrate is definitely worth a visit.

   

3. Florist shops. I search for well-known shops like L’Arrosoir reportedly the oldest florist shop in Paris or my favourite florist shop/restaurant in Florence La Ménagère complete with grand piano.

   

4. Greenhouses and glasshouses are another favourite visit. I still remember the carnivorous plant house at Glasgow Botanic Gardens - pitcher plants, sundews and sarracenias that felt more like something from another world than something grown in soil. They also provide wonderful respite in cold weather, and I have a thing for giant water lilies which are central to glasshouses.

   

5. Flower markets are always worth wandering through, whether it’s a gigantic wholesale market at dawn or a small neighbourhood market tucked down a side street. Some are well known, like the Amsterdam flower market or Ile de la cite Paris.

   

6. And then there are the places you don’t immediately think of as floral destinations. Museums often hold extraordinary botanical still life artworks - Monet’s waterlilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris is a perfect example or Rijksmuseum for Dutch Master still life flower paintings.

   Claude Monet famous Les Nympheas at Musee de l’Orangerie

7. Butterfly houses have flowers in bloom in order to feed them. Occasionally a zoo will have a Butterfly house, such as in Amsterdam, or there’s one located in Terminal 3 (T3) of Singapore Changi Airport houses the world’s first butterfly garden in an airport. Burggarten in Vienna is a quiet and relaxing oasis in the city.

   

8. Public Garden Schemes. The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in the UK operates a Partner Gardens program where over 230 gardens are open to the public. There is also the National Garden Scheme where the public can explore thousands of exceptional private gardens.

9. Sometimes timing works in your favour and a floral workshop lines up with travel plans. That kind of coincidence feels like a small gift - an accidental overlap between work, curiosity, and place. My very first international workshop just happened to coincide with a work trip to London 2 years ago and late organised workshop by Wagner Kreusch and Frida Kim.

   

10. Top echelon luxury hotels can become floral destinations. The Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris is one of the most famous examples, where Jeff Leatham’s ever-changing installations turn the lobby into a living floral gallery.

    

    

11. Beyond cities, the search shifts again. Flower farms are obvious places to find flower and form an interesting break on a road trips.

    

12. Then there’s farmgate stalls, wildflower walks, arboretums and forest trails become our focus. Some of my favourite memories haven’t come from famous gardens at all, but from stopping the car beside a field in bloom or finding a small farm selling bunches directly from the gate.

    

13. In transit you can find gardens. Singapore International Airport has an enormous indoor tropical, succulent and butterfly garden located at various terminals.

14. And there’s something that’s not a flower but still as equally interesting, a food farms. We were travelling in Iceland and were staying in a totally clear inflatable igloo and complained about the bright lights on the horizon. Turned out to be a hydroponic tomato farm. We checked it out the next day, had some tomato soup in the glasshouse restaurant with the tomatoes and wandered around. It was fascinating!

    

Of course, not every destination delivers on expectation. Some gardens are underwhelming, we are after all undergoing climate change and others are simply better at different times of year. A little research helps, but there are no guarantees. If there’s no flower turn your mind to the smaller things, leaves, textures, fungi, insects a forest floor treasure hunt.

And perhaps that’s part of the joy.

Because floral travel isn’t really about ticking off destinations. It’s about following small threads of curiosity - sometimes planned, often accidental - and seeing where they lead. Its the fields of yellow flowering canola that, whilst not on any blooming calendar, makes a spectacle along the roadside, and these moments can be totally unexpected, surreal moments on a long drive.

Until that all-in-one flower app exists, I’ll keep doing it the long way.

One garden.
One roadside bloom.
One unexpected discovery at a time.

Next week, I not sure what to write about. I’ll let my energy and thoughts inspire me. I hope you’ll join me. Please consider upgrading to paid to help me share with you our world of flowers.

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Thank you for being here and reading The Flowerlogue.

For more information on my floral life you can find me at my new Instagram account or Linkedin.