by Yvonne Horn

“I’ll tell you all about the monu­ments as we go along,” Sylvia Kolbe suggested as we set out to walk what was once the city of Leipzig’s fortified walls and today is the Promenadenring, an encircling ring of leafy, sometimes flowery, greenery.

I’d requested a city guide knowledgeable about not only the city but plants and gardens. Sylvia was perfect. She is not only a Leipzig resident with long generational ties to the city but one with a love of gardening...

by Yvonne Michie Horn

San Miguel de Allende was just another sleepy, colonial backwater in Mexico until the 1950s, when it was discovered by creative and artistic souls. Slowly and then more quickly it became an expatriate darling until it stretched far beyond its quaint, cobbled streets and lovely old buildings.

Gated communities — largely American and Canadian inhabited — had gradually taken over six of the seven canyons surrounding the town’s historic center. In 1989, the...

When Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens opens for the season in the spring of 2010, its ornate gates will swing wide for the 168th time, providing, as from Tivoli’s first days, “a magical place for recreation and fresh air.”

That is how Tivoli’s creator, Georg Carstensen, a publisher of periodicals, described what he had in mind when he approached King Christian VIII to ask for permission to realize his dream. He topped off his proposal by mentioning that “when the people are amusing...