Florence

"Children are living beings-more than grown-up people who have built shells around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love."

(Rabindranath Tagore)

"One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun."

(Jane Goodall)

Amsterdam

"Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town."

(James Weldon Johnson)

"In Amsterdam the water is the mistress and the land the vassal. Throughout the city there as many canals and drawbridges as bracelets on a gypsy's bronzed arm."

(Felix Marti-Ibanez)

Tulips

"Like Tulip-beds of different shape and dyes,

Bending beneath the invisible west-wind's sighs."

(Thomas Moore)

"How can one help shivering with delight when one's hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with new born vigour!"

(Colette)

London

"And marbled clouds go scudding by

The many-steepled London sky."

(John Betjeman)

"I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?"

(Charlotte Bronte)

Seville

"For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her."

(Earnest Hemingway)

"I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain."

(George Orwell)

Florence

"Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."

(W B Yeates)

"But from the start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says "I am", and forms the core of personality."

(Diana Gabaldon)

Flossy

"The simplest toy, one which even a young child can operate, is called a grandparent."

(Sam Levenson)

"A grandmother thinks of her grandchildren day and night, even when they are not with her, she will always love them more than anyone would understand."

(Karen Gibbs)

Great Fosters

"A painter should be able to make a good picture of any subject, but it is done, not by literal statement of formations, but by work which shows his application of the nature of the scene-its dignity, or repose, the desolation of it, or its association with human beings. Perhaps its individuality must be insisted upon; or lost in a larger idea that is suggested by a mood of nature, the heat of the day, the softness of the spring air, or the gales of autumn.

(Rex Vicat Cole)

"The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives."

( Gertrude Jekyll)