Ha! Those of you who have known me via blogging for several years will be surprised to see me use Garden Hopping as a title for a blog - It used to be the name of my blog, it was my USP - I wrote about garden visits I had been on with my designer's eye. Designer's eye? Well yes - I have trained to be a garden designer in my time. I studied Architecture too, so I reckon that gives me the right to call myself a designer, although I seldom mention the fact.

Anyway, I digress. Yesterday it was a lovely barmy late summer's day, and the iGit and I had decided to drive into London and do a spot of Garden Hopping.  For several years now I have wanted to visit Victoria's garden in Wandsworth which she opens under the National Gardens Scheme, but it has always clashed with our plans to go away and celebrate our wedding anniversary.

This year, the bank holiday weekend is a bit earlier in the month, so I leapt on the chance to go. I first met Victoria, through blogging - me with Garden Hopping, and her with Victoria's Backyard.  We clicked, but then maybe we should have, we even share the same birthday!I had never met Victoria in the flesh until one bonkers marathon garden visiting day, when I had  spent the morning at Sissinghurst,  followed by an afternoon at Sarah Raven's Perch Hill, and then later on to Helen Yemm's home for a lecture and  tour of her garden. I was standing by a pond luxuriating in the fragrance of the huge Pittosporum tobira waiting patiently to ask Helen a question, when I recognised the lady talking to Helen from the side bar photo on her blog. It was Victoria! I introduced myself and well the rest is history - I think I may have been the first blogger that she had met in real life. Think she was relieved to discover I didn't have two heads.

So back to my visit to Victoria's garden yesterday. We parked in the road opposite her house, and I didn't need to check which house in the street it was we had to head for. The massive phormium outside told me I had arrived. It was unmistakable. I knew what lay behind the facade was not going to be your typical suburban garden.  I wasn't let down.

I grew up in the Far East, jungles and plantations were part of my life, and the minute I walked out of the alley alongside the house into the garden, the atmosphere instantly took me back to my childhood. The sense of enclosure and verdancy had me in mind of the wild areas I used to play in as a child alongside my Arma's kampong. The screeches  and flashes of lime green of the now endemic Parakeets simply added to the atmosphere.  Bamboos and large bold cannas,, fatsias, figs, ferns, phormiums, all provided a tapestry of leaves reminiscent of far away places.  Foliage texture and colour is a very important part of this garden.  Many of the plants such as the tree ferns, the huge magnolia and the pine give an air of permanence. Dinosaurs could have been here before me.

Several themes ran through the garden and were repeated rhythmically, adding to the sense of harmony. The vibe I got from the space was overwhelmingly oriental.  The colour was restricted, and clever and careful use of the silver-grey found on the Eucalypyus's trunk,  also appeared in a galvanised tank water feature, trellising that was used to lift the eye away from boundaries and define spaces, to the benches that in themselves were focal points, and invited you to sit and rest a while.

 The pots and other ornaments had obviously been chosen with a careful eye, bamboo wind chimes, bronzed lanterns that looked like miniature versions of Angkor Wat peeking out from behind foliage, even the jug of flowers on the terrace between two steamer chairs featured  the most stunning terracotta chrysanthemums, which perfectly echoed the  colour of terracotta pots used to hold the eye as you wandered around. Many of these pots were placed like a flower arrangement, a vignette, to stop and make you pause a while before moving on the next step of your journey around the garden.

There were several small ponds, some tiny, but all added to the feeling of tranquillity, and I think their sound and moisture  they lent the air added to the fantasy that I had just arrived in some tropical paradise, I could have been on a verandah in Malaya or Borneo. It felt like a holiday, which when you do what Victoria does for a living, and live in one of the most populated and vibrant cities in the World, London, it is exactly the right antidote to London life.