Castlewellan Forest Park.

                I'm certainly no aficionado when it comes to art. As a painter my mother has always taken the family along to galleries, and as a result I could name some names - da Vinci, Caravaggio, Monet and Manet, Picasso and Pollock - but whether I would be able to express much of an opinion on any of them is a different question! However, there is one artist I really have come to admire: Bob Ross. He's no longer with us, but through the 80s and 90s he had a great old show called The Joy of Painting. With his tips and tricks he taught his audience to paint some of nature's most beautiful scenery - mountains, waters, and famously "happy little trees". His ethos was to make things as simple and as encouraging for the public as possible, and while painting he would often be rambling about his Christian faith or his love of wildlife, even bringing rescued animals and birds from home into the studio. In reality that was the charm of the programme, more so even than the finished work. It may not have produced a generation of Botticellis, but it left thousands of people interested and willing to try - and if I could replicate that in some small way with horticulture I'd be a very happy man. All the same, his finished works were lovely to look at: the glades of Florida, Alaskan pine forests, morning mist rising from bubbling streams.

                It was a surreal but very enjoyable feeling then, to find Michelle and I wandering into one of his paintings about a week ago. Castlewellan Forest Park is a favourite of Michelle's family, a really mixed forest with so many different species of tree encircling a great lake at its centre. Each colour from the rich autumnal palette there loomed out at us - softer shades from a distance, through the day's fog, and brightening as we walked closer. Sounds came echoing from every side of the water, with geese honking and children shouting on their bikes, but the lake's surface lay undisturbed, by evening as still as glass. It really did seem as though we had had our little figures painted into one of his scenes.

Although it's not unusual for 18th century parkland to come with a folly, Castlewellan's Moorish-inspired tower is absolutely unique. With countless little ferns growing between the brickwork, it has been "Irishised" rather nicely, and the gracefully-shaped windows are marvellous for gazing out on to the forest's canopy. We found it on our second lap of the lake, following as many paths as we could and remaining until it was quite dark.