Europe > Portugal > Madeira > Madeira > Ecology and wildlife > Articles > Madeira in Spring

Coming to Madeira from the grey grip of a chilly English spring was like entering one of those ecstatic dreams where all the bad things have gone away. My first morning I opened the shutters early on a soft day of blue and white, with the scent of flowers coming in and the sunlight lying in thick bars across the room. By nine o’clock I was away up the hillside behind Funchal with the Landscapes of Madeira walking guide in my hand and a flower book in my pocket. Portugal’s beautiful Atlantic island is made for ramblers jaded with the dulls and damps of northern Europe; and as for the flowers – well, I was walking on those, brushing the dew from their blooms with my boots.

Madeira reaches out and grabs you, draws you in and absorbs you. The beauty and the drama of arrival the previous evening had taken my breath away. Flying in across a track of pearl and gold laid by the setting sun across the Atlantic, I watched the island shape itself as a dark mass hardening from a billow of pink sea-level clouds. The plane wheeled and dipped, and we were suddenly rushing below volcanic mountain peaks, past terraced slopes and gardens and over the red roofs and yellow lights of Funchal, to ease down on the runway.

The sight of all that fertility, the human scale of the town under jagged black peaks rising from the empty sea, was unexpectedly moving. It was a fine introduction to the ‘Island of Eternal Springtime’ where soft winds blow, where the sun is never too hot and the rain never lasts too long. Madeira lies right in the track of the trade winds, and down the centuries the island has played host to voyagers passing between the Old and New Worlds. Plants from the Americas and from Europe have flourished alike in Madeira’s rich volcanic soil. The island is a nursery so fertile and so handily positioned that after its 15th-century ‘discovery’ and settlement by the Portuguese, explorers would make experimental plantings of New World seeds in this Atlantic outpost before launching them on Europe’s shores. So developed Madeira’s fabulously diverse range of trees and flowers, wonderful both to expert botanists and to rank amateur ‘Gosh-that-looks-pretty’ enthusiasts like me.

Madeira has many fabulous botanical gardens. But the best way of all for a newcomer to get to grips with the overflowing flora of the island in springtime is to enjoy the flowers where they grow wild, up in the hilly countryside that rises to tremendous peaks. Madeira’s volcanic landscape looks sensationally steep, enough to make the average country walker from Britain think twice about greasing his boots. But in its levadas or man-made irrigation channels the island possesses an asset that opens up the flowery interior to anyone with a reasonable sense of balance and a bit of a head for heights. It’s all nice and level along the levadas.

The story of how these irrigation channels were constructed through the mountains of Madeira is a remarkable one. The 40-mile-long island contains over 1,000 miles of such narrow, snaking conduits, many of them built round sheer drops and impossible precipices by men suspended in baskets and at ropes’ ends. It’s the maintenance paths, faithfully shadowing the levadas’ every twist and turn, that attract holidaymaking walkers. If you are sure-footed and don’t suffer from vertigo, there’s no better way to catch a glimpse into the working lives of Madeira’s small-scale farmers, and also to get an instant feel for the mountainous landscape of the island.

Following the Levada do Norte a few miles inland of Funchal, I crossed terraced mountain slopes squared into tiny fields full of grapes, bananas, potatoes, cabbages and green beans. ‘Bom dia, good morning,’ was the greeting from a woman bent over her vines, a young girl hefting a huge sack of vegetation and a man with a scythe flashing in the morning sun. Every square inch of these fields has to be worked by hand; the slopes are far too steep for machinery. They are almost too steep for walkers, too, in places where the ground beside the levada falls away in sheer drops hundreds of feet deep. You just have to stare ahead and grit your teeth until these ‘bad steps’ are behind you.

Banks of white arum lilies and the blue globes of agapanthus lined the Levada do Norte, along with oleander bushes in full bloom. The same rich red and brown soil that produced the beans and bananas under constant cultivation had also brought forth this lush flora in every corner and crevice that had never felt the cut of a spade or scythe; anywhere a common native plant or the seed of some exotic blown from a specialist’s garden could get a roothold.

These days the botanical gardens established by those plant pioneers of previous centuries are in their full maturity. After my levada walk I spent a slow afternoon in the Palheiro Gardens up behind Funchal, strolling the cobbled pathways through avenues of nailpolish pink camellias and under the peachy trumpet flowers of thorn apple trees. There were sunken gardens and ornamental ponds, rose pergolas and formal hedges. I watched an elderly Englishman, as thin and meagrely crested as a heron, dipping his beak into this bloom and that, measuring and note-taking as he smiled a connoisseur’s smile to himself.

Later in my Madeiran visit I found out what the islanders are doing to try and re-established Madeira’s much-reduced native flora of laurisilva. This beautifully rich mixture of heathers, laurel, Madeiran cedar, broom, oleander and other naturally occurring species was devastated by cutting to make way for foreign plants over the years – especially in the early part of the 20th century when dense plantations of eucalyptus and acacia were introduced on the island’s south-facing slopes as quick-growing material for the wood-pulp industry. It was an ecological disaster. Most of the native plants were smothered or shaded out, and the greedy pulp trees sucked up far too much water.

A 2,500-acre Ecological Park has been established above Funchal in the heart of the pulp forests, and the eucalyptus and acacia are being cleared away. Better still, the native laurisilva plants are being reintroduced to the slopes. They are grown in the park’s nursery, each in a tin salvaged from a Madeiran hotel or hospital. Schoolchildren are taken to the park at regular intervals, and these small citizens of Madeira dig a tin apiece into the hillside. The tin soon rots away, and the young sprig of laurel, fern or heather is left to grow.

Up in the mountains behind Funchal it’s generally misty in the afternoon, as it was the day I went out around the Ecological Park with ranger Alexandre Fernandes. “You see these tree heathers,” Alexandre told me, “they hold water in the ground, up to 10 litres per tree, and they turn the mist into what we call ‘invisible rain’. Very good for all these other plants – the til tree, cow’s tongue, mimosa, these oleanders, and the fisherman’s laurel, and this lovely blue brushy one that we call Pride of Madeira.”

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