About a thousand people gathered on a balmy and clear Sunday to listen to some opera at the Palm Valley at the Botanic Gardens.

Most came with picnic baskets, nibbled on cheese, sipped their wine and caught up on gossip between Delibes and Donizetti, while the kids ran around the trees. It really was an enchanted evening.

I do hope this is going to be a regular event, and also that the singers wear something bright and colourful the next time around; we could barely see them and we weren't sitting too far away.

If there is going to be another edition, we also hope to hear about it in advance. One way would have been more signs in the gardens itself. There were benches all around advertising the garden festival which is more than a month away and not a single sign about Opera in the Park, not even one piddly directional sign.