Garden holidays in Italy: a horticultural grand tour By the end of the morning a cheerful (male) plant scientist in our party has been dragooned into cataloguing 400 years" worth of family documents that spill out of every cupboard, and we are all volunteering to spend the summer weeding the romantically overgrown garden in return for a daily allowance of pasta. Isola Bella rises from Lake Maggiore We had started our escorted gardens tour in Venice - especially beguiling during the art Biennale, when bizarre pavilions popped up all over the city, offering giant glass pine cones, or chairs suspended from the ceiling, or a womb-like cocoon of carpets from Azerbaijan. And in Verona, where the house in which Shakespeare's Romeo is said to have wooed his Juliet is a sight best avoided by all true romantics, dignity is restored by the venerable Giardino Giusti on the outskirts of the city. It is a classic Renaissance Italian garden, dating to the 1570s, all clipped box parterres and pots of lemon trees, tinkling fountains and giant cypresses. The would-be archivist in me is in seventh heaven. These massive trees, more than 700 years old, are the same ones admired by Goethe, by Stendhal, even by John Evelyn in 1644. The knee-high maze, with its cunning curls, has been puzzling visitors for centuries. Our group seeks out the garden's secret - a twisty stairway in a tower, tucked away in a corner, leading up to a second, concealed garden from where you can see over the rosy roofs of Verona. Breathing in the warm, resinous scent that is the unmistakable, irresistible smell of Italy, we could stay here forever. Delightful in a different way is a Sunday visit to Isola Bella, the rose-decked garden island that floats like a galleon on the waters of Lake Maggiore. We find it heaving with families out for the day to chase the peacocks, clamber over the rising terraces and make spooky noises in its shell-encrusted subterranean caverns, but this only adds to the Baroque party atmosphere. Just across the water, the peaceful Isola Madre is like another planet - a gentle, sylvan paradise that enchants plantaholics and non-gardeners alike. The gardeners are well served, however, by our elfin guide Sylvia, with her encyclopedic knowledge of the rare and exotic plants that thrive in the microclimate of the lakes. On Lake Como, where the residents, notably one George Clooney, are every bit as exotic as the flora, the pinnacle for me is the Villa Melzi, a magical lakeshore garden in the exuberantly floriferous town of Bellagio. It is raining when I visit and I seem to have the garden entirely to myself, save for a sole, industrious gardener. There are Oriental groves and crisply clipped avenues, terraces accessed by secret stairways, dinky pavilions on the rocky shore. The lawns are pristine, the shrubs and trees meticulously labelled, the fountains in good repair. This is rare in Italy, where horticultural maintenance is always an issue. But then, Igor, the sole gardener, comes from Lithuania. Best of all are the long, misty views across the lake. You might think all would be first-rate on this, the launch tour for the Royal Horticultural Society. But, oddly, this garden is not on the itinerary selected by the RHS; I have dashed off to see it in our allotted lunch hour (a shame, in a town so full of inviting restaurants). Also left off the schedule is Como's most important historic garden, the Villa Carlotta, though our boat to Bellagio stops, tantalisingly, only yards from the gate. Five minutes from here is the ravishing Villa Balbianello - where Daniel Craig's James Bond recuperated in Casino Royale - which we can only scan through binoculars. Bellagio's Villa Melzi, a Lake Como highlight, will be included in future itineraries Instead, we are unaccountably bused off to the Swiss town of Lugano, where we visit a most interesting but oddly scheduled ethnographic museum. Perhaps the raison d"être is to allow us to purchase Swiss watches; none of us does. Our scheduled garden at Bellagio, meanwhile, is not the poetic Villa Melzi, dubbed the "pearl of the lake," but the somewhat scruffy woodland garden of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Villa Serbelloni. Here our voluble guide marches us, like the Grand Old Duke of York, rapidly to the top of the hill and down again, sharing trenchant views on Mussolini but curiously vague on the subject of the trees. Similarly, at Lake Maggiore, the itinerary offers not the celebrated botanic treasure house Villa Taranto, but a 45-minute visit to an alpine garden, perhaps because of the thrill involved in reaching it by cable car. Happily, we have the afternoon free - there are fewer visits included than on similar tours by garden holiday specialists - so we all go to Taranto anyway. It is by now apparent that the RHS has not troubled to do a recce for this holiday - either of the gardens or the accommodation. My "lake view" at the 900-room Grand Hotel Dino on Lake Maggiore, for instance, constitutes an 18in sliver of it beyond a wall - and I can see it only if I stand side by side with the pimply conference delegate on his not-quite-shoulder-wide balcony next door. But at least there is a glimpse. At the Grand Hotel di Como, the rooms are very comfortable but the views of an industrial shed and filling station somehow lack romance. Nor is the food up to scratch, to the point that the vegans in our party are left so hungry they are obliged to go out foraging for supplies. Can feeding vegans really be that hard in a country endowed with fresh, natural ingredients and synonymous with made-from-scratch cuisine? Britain is blessed not only with outstanding gardens but with a number of excellent companies specialising in garden tours. So it is somewhat puzzling that the RHS has chosen to partner Collette Worldwide Holidays, an American-owned company with no special expertise in gardens, to run its first venture into garden breaks. While our saintly tour manager was heroic in her efforts to keep us all happy, this tour, at least, offered poor value compared with those of specialists such as Boxwood or Susan Worner. The RHS has, it says, taken note and made extensive changes. At Como, the lakefront Villa Carlotta, once part of Europe's Grand Tour, is now included, as is Giardini di Villa Melzi, which stretches along the lakeshore of the Bellagio peninsula. In Varese, the garden city of Italy, Estensi has been added, as has Villa Taranto Botanic Gardens at Lake Maggiore, replacing "an afternoon at leisure." Villa Serbelloni is no more. "Although the overall itinerary was good, there were some teething problems," says a spokesman for RHS Garden Holidays. Certain aspects did not go as smoothly as either we or Collette would have wished. We addressed these with immediate effect and also provided financial compensation to guests. The accommodation, with the exception of the Venice hotel, will not be used again. Collette tour managers will from now on come from a horticultural background and all the content on the tours, including the horticultural element, is being fine-tuned in line with feedback from clients who have travelled this year. In addition, certain tours have an RHS specialist host for guests who want a still greater level of horticultural content and depth of knowledge. This is as it should be, for the RHS imprimatur encourages British gardeners to expect nothing short of the best. Ambra Edwards travelled with RHS Garden Holidays (0800 804 8710; rhsgardenholidays.com), which offers a nine-day Gardens and Villas of the Italian Lakes itinerary from £2,469 per person, departing May to September. The price includes return flight, b & b accommodation, some dinners, tours, airport transfers (up to a distance of 100 miles from the airport) and entry to all gardens on the itinerary. Each passenger will receive complimentary membership of the RHS for a year (current members will receive a free renewal). 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