I remember reading the book The Secret Garden when I was younger and loved the idea of an undiscovered garden. I have discovered some secret gardens in Spain on my walks and have taken some pictures this time for you.

The older properties in Spain were built in square blocks with the space in the middle of the blocks left undeveloped, known as verdes which means greens in Spanish.

In some places these verdes are also on the outside of the properties in between blocks of houses but in others they are in the middle accessible by footpaths between the houses but not obvious from the road unless you go exploring like me!

Left undeveloped they are just scrub and self seeding trees but quite often people choose to plant areas of these verdes outside their own gardens and create beautiful areas with stones to make beds and succulents and small trees. Often they use bits of pottery, broken flower pots or left over bricks and stones to make things like the bench in the first photo as well.

One of my favourites is just up the road from me, there is a large area of secret garden behind one house and smaller areas behind some of the others. The first house in the picture above has a large terrace that overlooks the garden which stretches for quite a way into the verde, the other house below it is just outside their garden wall.

 

I love the fact that people do this, in most cases it isn’t really seen either by them or other people but it is lovely to come across these unexpected areas of planting. In this picture below you can see the contrast between the planted area and the untouched bit in the foreground of the picture.

The plants in La Marina are so different to what we have here in Yorkshire, the area is so dry, it hardly ever rains and so most of the vegetation is palms and cacti with colour mainly coming from bougainvillea which have the most beautiful papery flowers and seem to survive in no water at all.

These are some pictures that I took while coming home one day, there was the bluest sky and I love the contrast between that and the green of the plants and the pink of this perfect little branch of blooms.

There is such beauty all around us and it is good to stop and look at it and really appreciate it.

Take care and thanks for visiting.