Spanish Sun!

I don’t like to gloat, but I’ve just returned from Spain where, for an entire two and a half weeks, the temperature was a perfect 27C and the evening air was thick with the smell of jasmine.
Not only were the gardens a joy to behold, with hibiscus blossoms the size of saucers and bougainvillea scrambling across every wall, but the oranges hanging from the trees were showing the first signs of ripening and my staple diet of tomato salad, nectarines and pineapples made the fruits sold in this country taste like balsa wood.
As I have a five month old son I am, as you might imagine, an early riser and in the mornings I would push the buggy down to my favourite café with a view over the marina, leaving baby’s dad to enjoy a long lie.
Many of the houses here are owned by families from Madrid, who only came down to the coast at weekends, so I had a perfect opportunity to dally by gateways and stand on tiptoe and peek over walls in order to get a better look at the gardens.
This area, which lies an hour south of Alicante, is known as the market garden of Spain and has a rich agricultural tradition, and I’m convinced that the soil is so fertile that if you dropped a wooden clothes peg it would sprout into a tree.
I’m sure that Gardening Scotland visitors would have appreciated the rich variety of flowers, shrubs and trees and there were times I convinced myself that I really was in the Garden of Eden.
Paradise had its serpent, however, and so did we in the shape of a Montpelier snake, or Culebra Bastarda, to give it its Spanish name, which was trapped in the conservatory overnight.
When it was discovered I did the only sensible thing and fled to the café with the baby, leaving my partner to deal with the intruder.
It took two and a half hours of sparring before he managed to trap it in the washing machine, at which point the only option was to disconnect the machine, wheel it down the drive and unscrew the top to allow it to escape.
As a severe snake phobic, tackling the laundry for the rest of the holiday left me with a very queasy feeling.
Agnes Stevenson