On saturday last Mike and I attended a book launch “Arboles de Montevideo” written by Eloisa Figueredo and beautifully illustrated by Javier Lage. The morning promised a talk by the author Eloisa Figueredo (who has loved ‘trees’ all her life) to be followed by a tour of the garden, and then a tour of the 1918 house itself, a small museum we hadn’t ever heard of, Museo Quinta in calle Vaz de Ferreira in the Atahualpa barrio of Montevideo, adjacent to the historic Prado.

The 11am talk began at about 11.10, and every few minutes someone else shuffled in trying to not be noisy but nevertheless disruptive to both speaker and audience. The last stragglers wandered in at 11.35, requiring chairs to be moved across the wooden floor or lifted over heads to accomodate them….pretty typical in a country of people who have a fairly laid back approach to the concept of a starting time 🙂 We bought a copy of the beautiful book and then instead of traipsing around with the guided tour, took our time to wander through the large urban block that from the beginning has always been allowed to grow completely naturally as a forest would.

Though Mike’s the one with the green thumb, we both love leafy green environments, wild or manicured, that are so good for our sense of well being. We love gardens generally, and once bought a fairly ordinary house in a Mt. Isa suburb of hundreds of others like it, purely for that particular house’s wonderful, slightly overgrown garden sporting magnificent fruit trees – mango, grapefruit, lemons, custard apples, pawpaws, bananas and more including a lovely white bauhinia tree.

Apart from the gravel path from the gate up to the house and around it’s base, all the other garden paths took us through the rich green foliage, around the tree trunks and over the roots, and they were simple bush tracks of composted fallen leaf matter, soft and quiet to walk on. Gorgeous.

As we wandered, every now and then we came close to a wall topped by coils of razor wire – a bit jarring, but so necessary for security these days around such a historic house that is no longer actually lived in.

These days the museum is only open for private events, but once per year it’s open to the public on the annual weekend of Dia del Patrimonio. However, speaking with one of the members of the board that controls the museum, I learned it can be booked for a special group tour, and put my name down to be notified by email of upcoming events there, because we will go back.