Last month we had a wonderful holiday with family on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan, with sunsets, wine-tasting and much good American food. Tabor Hill Winery

On one of our expeditions we visited the Fernwood Botanical Garden. There were woodland walks, prairie meadows and formal areas, but one particular display grabbed our interest for a long time. We became kids again.  A walk-in area of wooden structures and natural landscape with trains running in and out  and suddenly reappearing where you least expected them. It was wonderfully complex, engaging and utterly charming. There was so much to see, we didn’t know which way to look.   We watched these trains dipping in and out of the foliage, creeping round the sheer edge of a wooden cliff, or traversing great gaps balanced on twig like structures. Yet all the while I felt a sense of haunting, a constant tug by the images of another railway.  This is the Wampo (Wang Pho) viaduct, and this Fernwood. and this shows the bamboo scaffolding for the Bridge on the Mae Klaung (now renamed Kwai)and Far East prisoners of war and conscripted labourers at work on the Thailand-Burma railway in 1942/1943.                         This is Fernwood again.

Some of us cannot forget.