Deshaies' Botanical Garden

If you follow me on Instagram (if you don't, follow me on @gracemellor), you'd know that I recently spent 3 weeks on the beautiful French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. I visited a lot of Caribbean islands late last year, early this year and whilst I did explore the likes of St. Lucia, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Dominica, Grand Turk, Tortola, Barbados and a couple more, we skipped out Guadeloupe. I thought this was weird, it was one of the bigger Islands so I thought there would be more to explore... but either way, I got to explore it this Summer. 

 

Guadeloupe is shaped like a butterfly and so has 2 parts to it, the West side (where I stayed) was a hilly, volcanic rainforest which homed the Guadeloupe National Park and is called Basse-Terre whereas the East side, called Grande-Terre, is home to the more luxurious hotels and the whiter beaches. 

Some facts about Guadeloupe: 

Language - French (Officially, but some sign posts have creole on them and some of the locals speak it too)  
Population - just over 403,000
Size - just over 1,500km squared

If you read my first OOTD post from Guadeloupe (the only one I managed to upload before the wifi completely failed on me), you might have noticed that I shot the photographs in a botanical garden... and what a garden it was. I have always been a fan of botanical gardens and seeing the flora that thrives in countries other than my own - they always seem more exotic and more fascinating. I was staying at a villa in Pointe Allegre, near Saint Rose but my mum works in Deshaies so I went there everyday and so Jardin Botanique de Deshaies seemed like a great, relaxing first trip out to do. I paid €14.50, which I thought was quite a lot to see a garden, so I expected so see some beautiful plants and flowers and I was not disappointed. As soon as I entered the gardens I was surrounded by tropical plants and beautiful scenery. The gardens are really well kept and there are descriptive and informative sign posts everywhere (bare in mind these are french) which I thought was really good because it meant that I got to understand the history or at least a bit of knowledge about all the magnificent plant around me. The garden is very big and you can easily spend half a day there, so it's worth the money! And if you're worried about getting tired, there are seating areas all over the place so you can sit and just soak up the beauty of the trees etc. I'd recommend it to everyone, even if you're not a huge plant fan because it's incredible seeing exotic flowers and how they differ from the ones back home and it's an easy task to do for any age or physical ability, the whole family can do it! 

I hope you enjoy looking at the images of the exotic flora, I realise this post is super image heavy but I couldn't pick just a few images! They're all too cool. 

What's your favourite exotic flower or plant? 

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