by Yvonne Horn

“Ten years ago, this guy this tall.” Zabu Levin indicated a level close to his knees. “Kapooh! Now this tall!” His hand shot up as we looked through the monkey bread tree’s towering branches into the clear, blue Judean Desert sky.

The tree was a nighttime bloomer, Zabu told me, with large, white flowers that lasted but one night, attracting bats with their sweet nectar and the buzz of bees at dawn.

Zabu was walking with me through the botanical garden of...

by Yvonne Horn

Visitors are encouraged to touch, smell and even nibble a berry or two as they stroll through Alnwick Castle’s walled 12 acres of shrubs, trees and flowers. . . until they reach the Poison Garden. Here some of the world’s most toxic and hallucinogenic plants are grown, some so virulent or hallucinogenic that they are incarcerated in caged beds.

Whirlwind of controversy

When the Poison Garden opened in 2005, the year of my visit, it was but the latest...

by Yvonne Horn

It has always bewildered me, the fascination people have with the Panama Canal. The water goes up, the ship goes through, the water goes down. Because “canal” and “Panama” seem hopelessly connected, a trip to Panama remained on my Z list. . . until I heard of Boquete.

In the cool highlands of Chiriquí province, an hour’s flight from Panama City, Boquete was described in a local paper as a Shangri-la of tumbling streams plus mountains clad in rainforest, abundant...