Caribbean Compass Yachting Magazine February 2016

The new Blue Lagoon Marina and Hotel, combined
with existing businesses in the area such as Barefoot
Marine Centre, make the island of St. Vincent a real
pleasure to sail to. Blue Lagoon Marina has Customs
and Immigration officers there every afternoon, so it
makes a good place to check in.
ALL ASHORE…
A World-Class
Work of Art
in the Hills
of St. Vincent
by Chris Doyle
layered to draw the eye into cascading and swirling
shapes. I have often wondered how such an amazing
place grew up in the wilds of the St. Vincent hills. Here
is how it came about.
In 1991, Tim Vaughan, one of the Europe’s top garden
consultants, was taking a holiday in St. Vincent, where
he hiked from Richland Park junction to Georgetown.
The taxi driver who brought him back from Georgetown
said, “I want to show you something.” He took him to
Montreal Gardens, which in those days was growing
flowers to market. Even then it was spectacular: high in
the Mesopotamia Valley, nestled up against St. Vincent’s
dramatic mountains. Tim saw it in the fast-fading light
and thought, “What a paradise this place could be!” He
bought the gardens in 1994, started work slowly in
1995, and worked on the gardens for about 15 years to
bring them to their current splendor.
FEBRUARY 2016 CARIBBEAN COMPASS PAGE 26
St. Vincent also has some outstanding attractions. One of these is Montreal
Gardens. Hidden away and not overly visited (despite the occasional group from
a cruise ship), I rate it among the Caribbean’s world-class, if least known,
attractions. This is a place to enjoy at leisure. You could easily spend two or
three hours or more there, and if you take a packed lunch this is a great place
to enjoy it. It is about a 40-minute drive from Blue Lagoon by taxi or rented car.
It would probably take at least twice that long if you bused it (see details below),
and then you’d have to add time for a two-mile walk, which would make it more
like an all-day adventure.
Montreal Gardens is a living art form of carefully balanced textures and colors,
For gardener extraordinaire Tim Vaughan, the colors, forms and textures of tropical
plants make up an artist’s palette and the St. Vincent landscape provides a canvas
It has been a long road for Tim. His father was an English naval officer, a man who
considered gardening to be a fine hobby but not a career. Tim’s father found his son,
who was uninterested in school, to be unruly and in need of serious reform. He
decided to ship Tim, aged 16, to Australia under the now disbanded Big Brother
Movement. It was a form of indentured labor. Young Tim was under contract to work
for two years on a farm in what is now the major wine-growing area of Australia.
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