The Rumiñahui volcano in Ecuador

While some of you are going autumnal and fruitful, I have been going volcanic. I am spanning the world’s volcanoes from Etna to Ecuador, Vesuvius to the Pacific Ocean. It has never been a deliberate plan. I accepted to go to the Pacific’s Galapagos cluster without even realising that it was made up of volcanically created islands.

I now find myself heading for Etna as the BBC is turning Travelling Heroes , my recent history book, into a documentary film. In French, a volcanic landscape is sometimes known as pays brûlé. Over in the FT’s Life & Arts section, our own Brûlé, Tyler, claims to follow a fast lane but his is not half as volcanic as mine.

To acclimatise myself in Ecuador, I decided to check out the mountain flora from the seat on which I feel most comfortable, a horse’s back. I recommend a high altitude in the Andes as the most memorable way of breaking oneself in to Ecuador’s sea-level landscapes. Never mind the gasping that affects a rider at a canter. At heights between 15,000ft and 17,500ft, I have seen remote volcanoes in a semi-circle with flowers under my horse’s hooves, none of which is listed in the dictionary of the Royal Horticultural Society in Britain. I have also realised a childhood vision. “I went into a golden land, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi Took me by the hand” Perhaps you, too, remember these volcanic lines in WJ Turner’s poem “Romance”. I have now seen the best of them at a gallop with gentianellas flowering beneath my feet.

Robin Lane Fox saddles up

South of the capital, Quito, beyond the robust little town of Machachi, I rolled into the horse-hiring hacienda of Tierra del Volcán. I recommend it as my personal guesthouse of the decade. Miles from my own herbaceous borders, it has a familiar aspect and a locally woven roof of tufty grass. Up its bumpy drive, clumps of wild Red Hot Pokers flower against a fence for the farm animals. It is not often that pokers can be viewed against a flock of woolly alpacas and mountain horses. There is something heartening about flora that grows in gardens in England, so I wrapped up my borrowed poncho and my chaps of pungent goatskin and clambered on to a small bay stallion called The Engineer. Under the volcano, a classicist would be carried by a four-legged engineer to look for flowers in the undergrowth of the Páramo.

The Páramo, which has had few admirers since Alexander von Humboldt enthused about it in 1802, is the expanse of thickly grassed landscape that runs up to the snowline of the high volcanoes and is watered from their melting ice. It looks at a distance as bleak and brown as a garden of fashionable Eurograss in the wilder hills of Northumberland. On a closer look from the saddle, it is dotted with tiny blue flowers like perennial forget-me-nots, among prostrate yellow potentillas and the open mauve-purple petals of Gentiana Pumila.

By the time I had mastered the cowboy system of steering by pressure from the reins, my guide, Roberto, called me in for a health and safety announcement. Over the hill and beyond the last blue lupin on the horizon, we would be entering the territory of the Páramo’s herds of wild bulls. We are not talking here about flower-sniffing Ferdinands at peace under a Spanish cork tree. The chagras, the region’s cowboys, ride up here in season to surround the bulls in a horseshoe formationand force them downhill, looking for the boldest and wildest beasts. They then capture their choices for the next season’s fighting in the arena down in Machachi. They even hold cow-fights to discover which cow is the most hot-tempered and most likely to breed aggressive children.

In a flock in a grey-brown landscape, wild bulls are surprisingly tranquil, even to classicists at a nervous trot. Only the outliers can be awkward but, in case of difficulty, the advice is to gallop uphill because a horse is faster up slopes than a bull. On this particular stretch of the Páramo I fear I did not take in the flowers at all.

Lupinus Pubescens

With the bulls below us, we reached the last slope below the Rumiñahui volcano and paused to rest at a cooling height of 15,000ft. The wide-angled view looked just like primeval landscape but the Spaniards had long been here before us, grazing the ground with their cattle and turning it into the grey-brown wilderness that I had mistaken for virgin land. Even before the Spanish conquerors, the passing Incas had named the mountain the “dark rock”. To calm me, Roberto explained the medicinal powers of the surrounding plants. One with starry yellow flowers protects babies from bad eyesight, others are great for headaches while others with silvery leaves make a healthy tea to soothe coughs. There is even a shrub called Chuquiraga Jussieui whose orange-brown flowers look like brushes and are said to work wonders on premenstrual tension. We boiled up a minty infusion from another sprig of greenery and before I could inspect the nearby blue Lupinus Pubescens I realised the awful truth of mountain-riding: whatever goes up must come down.

When in doubt, give The Engineer his head and let him find his own level. My horse avoided the spongy bog and soon pricked his ears for the next volcano in the sightline. Out of the clouds, Cotopaxi showed the traces of her snow-white peak while the flowers returned in abundance and left me struggling to give them names. A white-flowered elder turned out to be Sambucus Peruviana among the scarlet tassels of little Castillejas, the Indian Paintbrushes that reminded me of those I had once raised from a botanic garden’s seed list. Rosettes of white flower at ground level were wild Valeriana Rigida, so different from the red valerian that tumbles in June from the chalk embankments of British railways. A wide open white daisy at next to no height was a Werneria, which I had never seen. A five-petalled yellow flower was a Hypericum Laricifolium. I doubt if any of you could have named what turns out to be Hypocharis Sonchoides. With a snort, The Engineer dismissed the slow art of botany. It was time for another gallop to the finest peak in the landscape.

While the wild bulls looked on in wonder, we galloped down the slopes of flowers below the fieriest snow volcano of them all. There are worse ways to prepare for the looming shadow of a new academic year.