IF EVER there was a place made for ramblers who are jaded with the dullness and damps of northern Europe, Madeira is it. Portugal’s beautiful Atlantic island reaches out and grabs you, draws you in and absorbs you.

Even the beauty and drama of arrival took my breath away. Flying in across a track of pearl and gold laid by the setting sun across the Atlantic, I watched the shape of the island — a dark mass hardening from a billow of pink sea-level clouds. The plane wheeled and dipped, and we were suddenly rushing below volcanic mountain peaks, past terraced slopes and gardens and over the red roofs and lights of Funchal, to ease down on the runway.

The sight of all that fertility, the human scale of the town under jagged black peaks rising from the empty sea, was unexpectedly moving. It was a fine introduction to the “island of eternal springtime”, where soft winds blow, where the sun is never too hot and the rain never lasts too long.

Madeira lies right in the track of the trade winds, and down the centuries the island has played host to voyagers passing between the Old and New Worlds. Plants from the Americas and Europe have flourished in its rich volcanic soil. The island is a nursery so fertile and so handily positioned that after its 15th-century “discovery” and settlement by the Portuguese, explorers would make experimental plantings of New World seeds in this Atlantic outpost before launching them on Europe’s shores. So developed Madeira’s fabulously diverse range of trees and flowers, wonderful both to expert botanists and to rank amateur “gosh-that-looks-pretty” enthusiasts like me.

Madeira has many fabulous botanical gardens. But the best way for a newcomer to get to grips with the overflowing flora of the island in springtime is to enjoy the flowers where they grow wild, up in the hilly countryside that rises to tremendous peaks. Madeira’s volcanic landscape looks sensationally steep, enough to make the average country walker from Britain think twice about greasing his boots. But in its levadas (man-made irrigation channels) the island possesses an asset that opens up the flowery interior to anyone with a reasonable sense of balance and a bit of a head for heights. It’s all nice and level along the levadas.

The story of how these irrigation channels were constructed through the mountains of Madeira is a remarkable one. The island is 64km long (40 miles) and contains more than 1,600km of these narrow, snaking conduits, many of them built around sheer drops and impossible precipices by men suspended in baskets and at ropes’ ends. It’s the maintenance paths, shadowing the levadas’ every twist and turn, that attract tourist walkers. There’s no better way to catch a glimpse into the working lives of Madeira’s small-scale farmers and to get an instant feel for the mountainous landscape of the island.

Following the Levada do Norte a few kilometres inland of Funchal, I crossed terraced mountain slopes squared into tiny fields full of grapes, bananas, potatoes, cabbages and green beans. “Bom dia” — good morning — was the greeting from a woman bent over her vines, a girl hefting a huge sack of vegetation and a man with a scythe flashing in the morning sun.

Every inch of these fields has to be worked by hand; the slopes are far too steep for machinery. They are almost too steep for walkers, too, in places where the ground beside the levada falls away in sheer drops hundreds of feet deep. You just have to stare ahead and grit your teeth until these “bad steps” are behind you.

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Banks of white arum lilies and the blue globes of agapanthus lined the Levada do Norte, along with oleander bushes in full bloom. The same rich red and brown soil that produced the beans and bananas under constant cultivation had also brought forth this lush flora in every corner that had never felt the cut of a scythe; anywhere a common native plant or the seed of some exotic blown from a specialist’s garden could get a roothold.

These days, the botanical gardens established by plant pioneers of previous centuries are in full maturity. After my levada walk I spent an afternoon in the Palheiro Gardens behind Funchal, strolling the cobbled paths through avenues of nailpolish pink camellias and under the peachy trumpet flowers of thorn apple trees. There were sunken gardens and ornamental ponds, rose pergolas and formal hedges.

I watched an elderly Englishman, as thin and meagrely crested as a heron, dipping his beak into this bloom and that, measuring and note-taking as he smiled a connoisseur’s smile to himself.

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