And hummingbirds flicker by tall, white foxgloves

Ecuador is plant-lovers heaven.

I have found myself in company with some pretty besotted plantsmen over the last couple of years, but no fern fetishist, no orchid ogler I have ever known can match the intensity of the birdwatchers we fetched up with recently in Ecuador. Up at 5am, breakfasted by 5.30, out all day with field glasses clamped to their eyeballs, back at nightfall, a snatch of supper, then out on to the balconies of their bamboo huts to send pre- recorded owl noises into the jungle dark. "Eighty today," confided one bright birder at supper. I thought he meant the temperature, but it was the number of new species he had knocked off his list that day.

We soon discovered, though, that in this particular place, a jungle lodge down the Rio Napo, to go out with a birder was the best way of guaranteeing a good walk. They are indefatigable in the distances they will travel to bag a new bird; they are quiet and touchingly generous in their efforts to convert you to the cause.

I like birds, but as I tried to explain to one young American attorney, there isn't enough room in one life for plants, let alone anything else. He looked at me pityingly. We happened to be out with him when he saw his bird of birds, the cocha ant shrike. The female, he had told us, was described only from a skin, the male, unknown. When we came upon them, male and female were both sitting on a branch in full view, singing, prancing about, and generally drawing attention to themselves in as shameless a way as possible. The attorney was beside himself with excitement, trembling so much he nearly upset the little dugout canoe we were in at the time. "You don't realise how lucky you are," he said breathlessly. "Nobody's ever seen this before." I tried to look pleased and excited, but the cocha ant shrike is a little black job awfully like masses of other little blackish things flitting about out there. I realised then what it must be like for non-gardeners to listen to enthusiasts boring on about the joys of Saxifraga federici-augusti. To them, it's just another little green job.

The attorney was oblivious to everything except birds. "Wonderful heliconias," I said one day, as we tightroped our way over a tree-trunk bridge. "What?" he said and I pointed out the huge brilliant red and yellow flowers hanging like lanterns in the dark greenery around us. "Oh yeah!" he said. "Haven't seen them before," although we had been walking past them every day. Butterflies did penetrate his consciousness, presumably on the basis that they looked more like birds than anything else around. The kingfisher-coloured blue morphos were spectacular, flapping their wings so slowly it seemed impossible that they could stay airborne.

Birds and flowers came together most spectacularly at Cusin, a 17th-century hacienda in the northern Andes, by far the best of the three places we stayed at in Ecuador. Wandering through the archway into the courtyard entrance, you have a curious sensation of a never-never land. Hydrangeas are blooming with orchids. By the hydrangea is a fat banana palm. And supping from the speckled flowers of tall white foxgloves are flickering, irridescent hummingbirds.

They have been very quick on the uptake. Cusin was bought, only six years ago, by an Englishman, Nick Millhouse, who introduced many cottage garden flowers among the agaves, avocado trees and eucalyptus that he found there. Although there is probably not another foxglove within a thousand miles of Cusin, the hummingbirds flit in for their drinks there with all the easy familiarity of a hack at Groucho's. I commented on the hummingbirds to the manager, Marcia. "Oh," she said, surprised. "Don't you have hummingbirds in England?" If only. I'd certainly trade them for the sparrows that are once again stripping the wisteria of flower buds.

Cusin, about an hour and a half's bus ride north of the airport in Quito is at San Pablo, which ranges around the eastern shore of a lake of the same name. All round are the peaks of the Andes and every day the view was different, for the clouds swirled endlessly round the mountains in a celestial version of the dance of the seven veils. Sometimes one of the mountains would let the clouds slip to reveal a vast peak, shining with snow and then quickly spin the gauzy cloud round itself again to cover itself up. It was a riveting show.

Agaves and eucalyptus were the dominant plants of the landscape here, the eucalyptus introduced and aggressive enough to see off most of the indigenous trees. But walking out from Cusin in big circular loops round the ridges and valleys, you came across masses of plants growing wild that we cultivate as garden plants. Orange-flowered eccremocarpus scrambled through the hedgerows like honeysuckle. Unimproved pale mauve verbenas crept along sandy banks, salvias grew everywhere. In grassland, where we might expect dandelions, there was tickseed (coreopsis) and Spanish daisy.

Fields of maize grew on even the most precipitous slopes, carefully ridged and furrowed to husband the water. When the sweetcorn was well established, the farmers sowed runner beans alongside them, so that the beans could use the sweetcorn as supports. I have combined peas and broad beans in this way, which works well as long as you choose a tall-growing cultivar of broad bean. This summer I am going to try the Ecuadorean way with runners.

Everywhere you noticed cultivation techniques that reflected a care for water as a resource. We are gradually understanding about the importance of mulching here, but we don't do very much by way of ridging and furrowing between crops or building little earth stockades round plants of tomato or squash or courgette. We buy sprinkler systems instead and spray expensively filtrated drinking water all over the garden. Back to the mattock, the tool that was most often in evidence in Ecuador. It's a bit like a spade, mounted at right angles to a long handle. You can chop up clods of earth with it and use it to draw soil up around plants. I inherited a whole family of them from a great uncle, but have never used them. Having seen how deftly Ecuadoreans handle them, I feel they ought to be brought back into commission.

Cut flowers seem to be the boom business at the moment. The hosteria we stayed in to the south of Quito was completely hemmed in by acres and acres of polythene tunnel, all growing roses. While sulphur cones burnt away inside the shelters, young women, without face masks or any other protection, were picking the unreally perfect blooms, each on a three foot stem. It put me off roses as a cut flower in a big way.

As many birders go to Ecuador for the cocha ant shrike or the harpy eagle, so many plantspeople go there for the orchids. Late summer is the best time for these, but even so, in winter we saw four or five different kinds. In the jungle were epidendrums and a dear little oncidium with a monkey face. In the mountains behind Cusin, growing on a rock face where they were drenched by the spray from a 100ft waterfall, were showers of wonderful red-flowered orchids. What were they? I haven't the faintest idea.

When I inquired of one of the birdwatchers in the jungle the name of a brown thing that flashed through my field glasses, he replied grandly, "I don't do flycatchers". So I'll take a leaf from his book and say equally firmly, "I don't do orchids".

The Hacienda Cusin is at San Pablo, Imbabura, Ecuador (06 918013; fax 06 918003).