Was it worth the journey to Edinburgh? And was it a Grand Day Out? Oh, yes, it was ...

It was dazzling.

From the jolly Caillebotte daisies outside the gallery and decorating my cupcake ...

To sizzling nasturtiums and dahlias, and yellow lilies floating on a lake.

Not forgetting some very handsome Savoy cabbages.

There were paintings of dewy mornings when you could feel the cool air in a garden of pink roses and morning glories.

And twilit evenings with the scent of lilac.

And I could imagine Monet fussing over his blue and white pots on his terrace at Argenteuil and worrying whether his Epiphyllum would survive the winter. (Every morning, at Giverny, he had one of his gardeners wipe the lily pads clean of traffic dust before he came down to the garden with his paints.)

I'm more of a laissez-faire gardener, like Renoir, whose Montmartre garden was a wilderness of poppies, convolvulus and daisies. 'Give me an apple tree in a suburban garden. I haven't the slightest need of Niagara Falls,' he said.

This exhibition was about people, enjoying their gardens. There were children's toys and games of hopscotch ... there was fruit cake and silver teasets and kettles and comfortable chairs in quiet, sunny corners.

Then, when I'd walked twice through the exhibition, I paid a flying visit to the gallery next door to see the best fried eggs in art history.

I ate haggis and clapshot mash in a stone-flagged kitchen with an old cooking range.

I walked around the New Town - which is very old - and took a shortcut through a graveyard once haunted by grave robbers. And thought that Edinburgh at dusk is surely the spookiest city I have ever seen.

And then I flew home. Because, if I'm honest, my feet were beginning to ache rather a lot.

But I wouldn't have missed it for anything.