The Camellias of Palacio Vila Flor

Eighteen camellias planted across two garden terraces here have outlived the building's most fashionable era by more than a century. The register puts them at around 195 years, planted in the 1830s, decades before the palace itself was extended into the grand house whose halls now show contemporary art. Camellia japonica arrived in Europe from East Asia in the eighteenth century as a hothouse curiosity for the wealthy; by the time these were planted it had become the flower a family used to say a garden mattered. Guimaraes and the wider Minho region took to it harder than most of Portugal, which is why the area still markets itself, without much exaggeration, along a Camellia Route. The eighteen trees here split into two groups on the lower and upper parterres of a three-terrace baroque garden, laid out with box hedges, stone fountains and a view back over the city; the garden won a national landscape architecture award in 2006. Camellias flower through the coldest months, January into March, when almost nothing else in a Portuguese garden is doing anything at all, which is presumably part of why a family planted eighteen of them and not one.