I know this is a wine blog, but the nose is following more floral scent this week. The trip to Lake Maggiore stemmed (excuse the pun) from the desire to visit two island gardens created by the Borromeo family.

Isola Bella is among the most glorious gardens in the world. It’s on a small island just a few turquoise metres from Pescatori, where Borromeo muscle moved out the fishermen in the C17th and Carlo III commissioned Angelo Crivelli and Andrea Biffi to design a stunning garden and monster sized palace for his wife Isabella.

We arrived early and found ourselves funnelled through the palate first. The earlier baroque part is a bombastic and tasteless with much common with contemporary bling, but this soon refines to more elegant classical lines. There is a long gallery hung with some of the most beautiful tapestries I have ever seen. Sixteenth century Flemish, they are embroidered with real and mythical creatures, unicorns, birds and lion-like beasts. Beneath the palace, at lake level, there is a bizarre series of interlocking chambers lined with stones and filled with curiosities, but it was the garden we‘d come to see and it exceeded expectations, in part because it’s unlike any other garden.

It resembles a ship afloat on the lake – the great prow carries the Giadino d’Amore above which towers the theatre and planted terraces descend between the tiers.

There is a wonderful sense of drama. It’s a baroque folly with its soaring obelisks and cypresses, statues of greek gods and cherubs, formal planting, topiary and citrus trees. It’s exuberant, theatrical and smells gorgeous with the scent of roses and cut grass.

Quite different is Isola Madre, which is looser in structure and more romantic with its sweeping lawns and informal planting. It blends a serious role as a botanical garden, a repository of rare species, with a relaxed feeling of a garden where you could spread your picnic blanket with the peacocks for company. Also created by the Borromeo family, it pre-dates the garden on Isola Bella where the family’s ambitions were much grander. The garden with its impressive variety of trees surrounds the warm coloured walls of a graceful villa. This has an unpretentious charm and houses an unusual and vast collection of marionettes and their theatre sets.

No self respecting garden lover would leave the lake without crossing over to Villa Taranto, another botanical garden, this time on shore and created not by an Italian aristo, but a Scottish sea captain. The bright planting isn’t quite my cup of tea, but I did like the pond floating with huge water lilies and the bog garden beneath a bridge (below). To be fair it would show best in spring when the camellias and azaleas are blooming. Maybe I was put off by the loud classical music coming from behind the bushes. Fancy keeping an orchestra playing all day in that heat!