Helena Attlee writes in this issue about Il Biviere, a 'post-diluvian' garden in Sicily, where Pricipessa Borghese has created a 'robust community' of exotic plants on land drained in the 1930s as part of the government's plan to rid Italy of the malarial mosquito – the plain south-east of Rome, around Ninfa, was similarly targeted.
Il Biviere is among the intriguing gardens we will be visiting on our tour of Sicilian gardens at the end of May next year. We begin near Palermo with drinks at Villa Tasca, where the garden supposedly inspired Wagner to complete Parsifal, and where the two swans on the lake are called – yes, you've guessed it – Tristan and Isolde. The following morning we visit Palermo's orto botanico, where Sicily's native flora intermingles with an abundance of tropical and sub-tropical exotica. Lunch that day will be at Villa Spedalotto, overlooking the sea, before we motor on to experience the 'eccentricities of the crumbling Villa Palagonia' in nearby Bagheria – and if that is not enough for one day, we take aperitifs that evening at the invitation of Princess Licata di Baucina at Palazzo Alliata di Pietratagliata.
Thus fortified, we drive across the island the following morning to see the garden at Il Biviere, where we will also have lunch, and in the afternoon visit the orange-growing estate of San Giulian, where the private garden contains many rare and exotic trees. Our fourth day begins with a leisurely walk through Taormina, taking in the Anglo-Italian Trevelyan gardens, followed by a visit to Ruggero Moncarda's Palazzo Biscari before driving into the foothills of Mount Etna to see the garden made by Sicily's most important twentieth-century landscape architect, Ettore Paterno.
We leave on the fifth day, but not before taking time to shop at Catania's celebrated food market and to enjoy a thoroughly traditional – yet modern – Sicilian lunch in the thoroughly modern plantsman's garden belonging to Rossella Pezzino. The tour runs from 28 May to 1 June and our hotels are the Villa Igiea with its opulent Art Nouveau interior and terraced gardens overlooking the Bay of Palermo and, at Catania, the San Domenico, a luxuriously converted fifteenth-century monastery with views towards Mount Etna. And if that were not enough, we have the expert guidance and delightful companionship throughout of Helena Attlee herself. I do hope you'll join us. As ever, full details may be obtained from Boxwood Tours: telephone 44 (0)1341 241717 or email mail@boxwoodtours.co.uk
From the Editor's introduction to HORTUS 92
‘I wasn’t sure that we had really made a garden’, Princess Maria Carla Borghese says, ‘until I received a call from Clarence House in London to ask if the Queen Mother could visit Il Biviere with some friends.' These illustrious visitors arrived in 1988 and responded to the garden with such delight that the princess was finally convinced she and her husband had achieved their aim. It had been a long journey. When they moved to Casa del Biviere, a thirty-minute drive south of Catania in Sicily, the house was derelict and rat-infested. ‘It was an awful place,' the princess admits. ‘There was no water, no trees or bushes. In fact, there was absolutely nothing here at all.’ Casa del Biviere had originally been a hunting lodge on the eastern shore of an enormous expanse of water called Lake of Hercules. In 1931 the lake had been drained as part of the government’s campaign to rid Italy of the malarial mosquito. It took twenty years for the water to seep away, and when the Borghesi and their four children arrived in 1968, they found a desolate, post-diluvian landscape. The children were delighted to find themselves living in the countryside and the prince began working hard to transform the fertile soil into a successful agricultural estate that soon began to produce organic citrus fruit, vegetables and grain. ‘I wasn’t too happy at first,’ the princess recalls, ‘but I soon realised that we had to stay, and then I decided to make a garden.'
When the Borghesi started to plan the garden they had ‘no idea’ what they were doing. They began by buying two books in California, one on exotics and the other on succulents. ‘This gave us an idea of all the plants that would grow in a climate more or less like ours,’, the princess says, ‘and from then on we experimented.' The result of this thirty-year experiment is a wonderful collection of native and exotic trees, shrubs and plants that grow in natural groups around the house, mooring it in the vast, open landscape.
From 'Il Biviere: a Post-diluvian garden in Sicily' by Helena Attlee
You don’t just build a Japanese garden. Everyone knows that few styles of horticultural creation are so lapped about with formalities, precedents, rules, principles and prohibitions. After all, experts have been refining the appropriate concepts for something like a millennium or so, to the point where whole shelves of treatises offer guidance (or further confusion) to the perplexed landscaper worried about where to place that rock or plant that azalea. Consider the absolute elegance of such chefs-d’oeuvres as Kyoto’s magnificent Ry?anji garden, consisting of nothing but raked sand and a few rocks, or the moss and pruned trees of the Katsura Riky? Detached Palace, or the miniature world of the tightly-enclosed Daiseinin, a few hundred square feet that brilliantly succeed in suggesting infinity. The complexity is obvious, the details more than precise, the strangeness palpable, but at the same time gardens like these carry an extraordinary emotional charge. No wonder they made such an impact when reports about them first reached the West, and no wonder the first attempts to create Japanese gardens here went so awry. Later attempts too, for that matter.
From 'Japanaiserie' by Charles Elliott
Over the past few years Peter Dale's articles in HORTUS have offered convincing evidence that Ireland contains many gardens which are both intensely atmospheric and unjustly little-known. Few if any, though, can be more atmospheric or less known than Heywood, tucked away off what is now a by-road in the rural heart of untouristified County Laois (formerly Queen's County). And few if any can have a more unlikely and unencouraging approach. Distinguished gardens whose long history involves substantial work by a world-famous architect aren't often, after all, approached through the grounds of a 1960s school, one whose flat-roofed profile somehow manages – like so many schools of that period – the unlikely feat of combining brutality with blandness.
Heywood's unique atmosphere is partly the result of its complicated history over more than two centuries, and partly the result of its more recent neglect. Its unknown-ness is also of course at least partly a result of that neglect: you have to be able to see beyond its current imperfections to appreciate its (impaired but still surviving) fascination, beauty and charm. It is also – and equally of course – partly the result of its current strangely uninviting 'introduction'. First you bounce through dense woodland along a speed-humped recent drive (designed to avoid collisions between school buses and parents' cars), with only the occasional glimpse of a ruin lost in the trees to preserve your belief that this is indeed where you are meant to be. Then you park in the usual tarmac-ed school parking area under the bored eyes of pupils staring down from the school's upper floor. You get out of the car, look around and find: absolutely nothing. Not only is there no house and no obvious sign of where a house can have been. At first there is no obvious sign of a garden.
Which was in fact not far from the situation when the Trench family, Heywood's original creators, arrived here in the early eighteenth century. The Trenches weren't Irish but Northumbrians of Huguenot ancestry who had been 'planted' in Ireland in the seventeenth century – at first in Galway, then spreading elsewhere and rising socially as they went, so that the heads of the family's most successful branches were Baron Ashdown and the Earl of Clancarty. The branch which acquired Heywood, however, was well-heeled but not titled. Most of its male members were at least nominally clergymen, soldiers or lawyers but were often more enthusiastic as amateur engineers or architects or simply as 'connoisseurs', 'men of taste'. They arrived first in the nearby small town or large village of Ballinakill, where William Trench and after him his son the Revd Frederick (a clergyman of the Protestant Church of Ireland, of course) had 'a sweet habitation' adjacent to the church. Even at that early stage they were clearly much concerned with landscape gardening since that 'sweet habitation' consisted, apart from the house, of '24 acres walled round 10 feet high, the ground naturally in fine slopes and risings, large trees properly dispersed, a river of very clear water running through flowing cascades. These rising grounds command very extensive views'. They didn't own that land, however. They leased it from the area's great absentee landlord, Earl Stanhope. The soil around Ballinakill was described at the time as being 'very fertile, and deep clay yielding both dairy and tillage'. (It still is: it still does.) But when they acquired more land outside the town they did so in pursuit of their interest in ornamental landscaping rather than in pursuit of an interest in commercial farming. (They did run sheep on some of their land but as picturesque objects and mobile lawnmowers as much as as a serious commercial venture.) What's more, they acquired that new land on the same leasehold terms as their land in the town. So, despite the vast amount of time and energy, money and taste, which over four generations they expended on improving their newly acquired estate, they never owned it. They tried, repeatedly, to own it: but could never persuade the current Lord Stanhope to sell. There was from the beginning a house of some kind on this land but (though no evidence of its nature survives) it was probably no more than a simple farmhouse. Certainly the Trenches were interested in neither the original house, or the farming land. What they were interested in was 'the prospect': because the highest point of their land commanded extensive views down an already wooded and stream-filled valley towards Ballinakill in the distance.
From 'It is Good to be the King: Heywood, County Laois, Ireland - Its Past, Present and (Uncertain) Future' by Tim Longville.
By and large I am not enthusiastic about flowers in the house. It is on feast days and holidays that they become essential; and how pleasing it is when the garden supplies what is needed for Christmas. But pleasing is too mild a description for the first plant of my choice, a small, chalice-shaped tree that brightens the dark days of the year's end. Here at Greencombe overlooking the north Somerset coast it grows in the vegetable garden and I usually take a look a few days before Christmas to see if it is ready to bring in. On 23 December its main decor is likely to be sea-green lichen, which looks miserable in cold dry weather and wonderful in rain. On 24 December I look again and it may well be coming into yellow bloom. The flowers are like stars, with narrow twisted petals, and it has a delightful elfin quality. Its great wonder is its fragrance, the epitome of good spicy things and contentment.
It takes me a long time to choose branches whose removal will not spoil the shape of the tree. Strictly speaking it is a shrub, but mine is ten feet (3m) high and wide. I do not nibble, taking a little from everywhere, but select perhaps a side branch that lies across another, or one that is on the way to occupying a space already well served. Finally I cut the branches and put them in the room where our main celebrations will take place – the fragrance on Christmas Day is wonderful.
From 'Christmas Flowers from My Garden' by Joan Loraine
If there is any of the schoolboy or -girl left in you then plant names can be a bit of fun, and Parrotia persica must surely raise a smile. There is nothing inherently funny about the name, but it does have a built-in quirkiness – it could just as easily be the name of a Persian member of the Psittadiceae and of the Hamamelidaceae, a parrot rather than a tree.
Back in class, stomata was another word that made us smile, because it was similar to tomato – not really funny, but still you'd look across at your classmate with a knowing twist to the lips during a tedious biology lesson. Stomata was fairly tame – there were words with saucy connotations that would raise a bigger titter in the classroom. School-boy humour reached its peak in science lessons, which were the last three periods of a Friday afternoon when the weekend was too close for serious thinking. Puerile without a doubt, but a fairly innocent bit of fun by modern standards.
There are other plant names that, as long as you are happy not to take yourself or nomenclature too seriously, have something about them to make you smile inside. Salvia uliginosa always becomes 'Sylvia uglinosa', cladrastis becomes gladrags, both cistus and cytisis become cystitus; alnus makes me think forearms, achillea suggests to me a demented Mexican with a gun aimed at his wife’s lover; hippocastanum does not bring horse chestnuts to mind. Robinia is surely an elegant lady mugger, and in my mind hydrangea has always been the taller brother of the Lone Ranger. Okay, okay, enough. Let’s be more serious about our subject, and if Dr J. J. F. W. von Parrot – for it is he whose name is enshrined in Parrotia – is up there looking down on this, then no offence meant, sir.
Parrotia is a genus with, until recently, only one known species, and you have to think that anyone whose name is honoured by being given to such a singular genus has to be someone special, and so he is. Johann Jacob Freidrich Wilhelm von Parrot was a German naturalist, traveller and scientist. He studied at the University of Dorpat, now in Estonia, but then in Russia; he travelled to the Crimea and the Caucasus, became a surgeon in the Russian army, and was at various times engaged in experiments in barometry and with the earth’s magnetism. He travelled to Finland to carry out some of his experiments. His most quoted achievement is that in 1829 he was the first person to climb Mount Ararat in the far east of Turkey. There is no record of him finding Noah’s Ark, which is believed by many to have come to rest on the top of this extinct volcano. It was two years after that feat, in 1831, that his name was given to the plant genus that bears it by Carl Anton von Meyer, who had made a great study of the Hamamelidaceae.
From 'Parrotia persica' by Paul Williams
Long ago John Masefield wrote that 'It ought to be made a penal offence for any man to write anything until he has knocked about a bit',2 and William Earl Johns (1893–1968) had certainly done that. In the First World War, after army service in the yeomanry and the machine-gun corps he joined the Royal Flying Corps, in 1917, and was wounded, shot down, and captured in 1918; he stayed in the Royal Air Force until 1927. Less well-known is that he was also a keen, well-informed gardener who between May 1936 and February 1947 contributed 106 articles, most under the generic title 'The Passing Show' (henceforth 'TPS'), to My Garden (henceforth MG), a monthly founded and edited by Theo(dore) A. Stephens (1897–1972).3
In his Foreword to Johns's The Passing Show: A Garden Diary, 'by an Amateur Gardener' (MG, 1937), consisting mainly of articles which had appeared in MG, Stephens relates how Johns, whom he describes as 'a born writer' and 'a born gardener', came to be a garden writer: it was simply coincidence that the offices of MG were adjacent to those of Popular Flying, and Stephens suggested that he write about his gardening experiences. Johns indeed believed that 'alpines and ailerons have a connecting link', and said: 'A crash from 20,000 feet and months in an enemy punishment camp left me a sorry wreck. It was then I started gardening, and it was the joy and surprise of seeing my first simple annuals in flower that did what doctors might have failed to do.' ('High Adventure', MG, February 1937). He became a real plantsman, collecting plants and seeds from all over Europe and buying them from all over the world, was extremely well-read in all kinds of literature, and wrote with authority and humour.4 As we would expect, his descriptions can be wonderfully vivid and exact: 'There is only one colour for a wallflower, and that is its original colour, rich, deep, coppery red-brown, flecked with brazen fire, so that a gathering of them looks like the wall of an old French kitchen when the setting sun pours through the west window.' (TPS, originally in MG July 1937). However, my concern here is with the dangerous and adventurous aspects of plants (especially orchids) and plant-hunting which, in both fact and fiction, naturally appealed to Johns. In one of his articles (TPS, MG, July 1942) he reports the story of a man-eating tree in Madagascar as described by Carl Liche and printed in The Antananarivo Annual and Madagascar Magazine, (edited by Revd R. Baron, Christmas 1881, a periodical which Johns fairly states 'is hard to find': how did Johns come by it?) Liche, with a companion, said that among the Mkodo pigmies a sacrificial victim, a woman, was made to drink the nectar in the cone at the apex of a tree sacred to the great tree devil; then the tree's palpi or tendrils 'like great green serpents' crushed her . . . 'It was the barbarity of the Laocoon without its beauty' – and finally the tree's leaves enveloped and crushed the woman. Ten days later all that remained was 'but a white skull'. Though the Annual declared the incident to be 'non est' (non-existent), Johns suggested that we should be cautious about dismissing the story as fabrication: 'Let us remember that native rumour has often materialised out of the jungle to confound scientists.'
From 'Vandas Will Never Cease: Capt. W. E. Johns and Dangerous Orchids' by Edward Wilson
‘A Forsaken Garden’ had first been published two months earlier, in the Athenaeum, in its issue for 22 July. There is no surviving archive of Hibberd’s papers; neither Cecil Lang’s great edition of The Swinburne Letters, nor the recent three-volume supplement compiled by Terry Meyers, contains any correspondence with Hibberd or any references to him. Hibberd may have obtained permission to reprint the poem directly from the publishers of the Athenaeum; the acknowledgment of that magazine as the source at least suggests that the reprinting was not simply an act of piracy. The poem was not issued in book form until 1878, when it appeared in Poems and Ballads: Second Series. Its appearance in the Gardeners’ Magazine seems so far to have eluded Swinburne bibliographers.
What would the horticultural readers, confronted with Swinburne’s poem in September 1876, have made of it?
Let’s start by being literal. What do we learn of the garden? First, it is a seaside garden, though exactly how close to the sea is left vague; it is at the ‘sea-down’s edge’, but there are also fields or meadows at a lower elevation that advance to the sea – whether between the garden and the sea, or simply positioned so that both fields and sea are visible from the garden. Depending on your interpretation of the fields, the garden is either south- or east-facing. We do not learn its size. It corresponds to no well-known English estate. The documented garden that matches the ambience most closely is Bawdsey Manor, Suffolk, where there is indeed a garden ringed with stone and fronting the sea, but that garden was not begun until after the publication of the poem.
From 'Swinburne's Forsaken Garden' by Brent Elliott
So here we are again. The nights are like wet black curtains, parting briefly to let some grey seep in. There is moaning in the kitchen garden, moaning in the borders, moaning at the bar. It is time to sort the apples, separating the sheep from the goats, for there are far too many of them; then beat a retreat to the studio. There are big windows there, and it is warmish, and in front of the big window a profusion of cuttings is clinging grimly to life.
There is no heated glass at The Hope, and the cold frames are very cold indeed, and propagation gets done not when it ought to be done but when someone gets round to it. So these cuttings were mostly taken in late summer, and desire to be launched into the world for hardening-off any time now. The way the world is at the moment, though, they will be less hardened off than frozen solid, like the Acer griseum seeds sulking in the bed the far side of the window. So there they sit, squadrons of whitefly droning through their upper fronds, waiting without much hope for spring.
Among the cuttings are single chrysanthemums and outcrops of pelargonium, to remind me of Cornwall and bring a faint whiff of the sub-tropics to the chilly Marches. None of your 'Lady Plymouth' here, with a thin niff of toothpaste. These are the deep-red rose-scented festoons that avalanche down the Neptune Steps at Tresco, whose warm winters keep them growing from year to year under the Atlantic sky. A sky which at this time of year sometimes cruises north as far as Herefordshire; at which point it is an idea to abandon the verminous hortus siccus developing under the office window, and head for the outdoors.
The winter patrol is a somewhat straitened affair. It is always good to check the gunnera, sprawled on the side of the pond with its leaves folded over its crown like the beast from the Mappa Mundi that sleeps wrapped in its gigantic ears. The dogwood is admiring its gory reflection in the big pond. The Duchess is flitting among the long shadows of the molehills, counting the number of flowers out. She cannot rid herself of this habit, acquired when she lived with her wicked mother just inland from Monte Carlo. But continuing it is a disaster for the gin, as it does not cheer her up at all. Quite the opposite, for the midwinter list is depressingly short. There is the carpet of polyanthus from which the dark fangs of yew rise beside the yard. There is the Viburnum bodnantense, the Lonicera purpusii, the winter jasmine and the clematis armandii. There are some croci and snowdrops and Siberian squills and self-sown grape hyacinths, which she thinks look so constipated that she scarcely classifies them as flowers. It is in vain that we point out the delicate traceries of frost on the sedums in the vertical rockery. She scowls, and curses all snowdrops, and heads indoors.
From 'Time for Another Bonfire' by Sam Llewellyn
You don’t just build a Japanese garden. Everyone knows that few styles of horticultural creation are so lapped about with formalities, precedents, rules, principles and prohibitions. After all, experts have been refining the appropriate concepts for something like a millennium or so, to the point where whole shelves of treatises offer guidance (or further confusion) to the perplexed landscaper worried about where to place that rock or plant that azalea. Consider the absolute elegance of such chefs-d’oeuvres as Kyoto’s magnificent Ry?anji garden, consisting of nothing but raked sand and a few rocks, or the moss and pruned trees of the Katsura Riky? Detached Palace, or the miniature world of the tightly-enclosed Daiseinin, a few hundred square feet that brilliantly succeed in suggesting infinity. The complexity is obvious, the details more than precise, the strangeness palpable, but at the same time gardens like these carry an extraordinary emotional charge. No wonder they made such an impact when reports about them first reached the West, and no wonder the first attempts to create Japanese gardens here went so awry. Later attempts too, for that matter.
From 'Japanaiserie' by Charles Elliott
Anthony du Gard Pasley (1929-2009) remembered by John Brookes MBE
Book Reviews:
Spirit: Garden Inspiration by Dan Pearson
Bulb by Anna Pavord
The Explorer's Garden: Shrubs and Vines from the Four Corners of the World by Daniel Hinkley
Remarkable Trees of Virginia by Nancy Ross Hugo and Jeff Jirwin
The Editor's Quarterly Book Bag includes reviews of Jelena and Rober De Belder: Generous as Nature Itself by Diane Andriaessen, Oxford Trees by Sophie Huxley, Extraordinary Gardens of the World by Monty Don, Gardens of the Loire Valley by Marie-Françoise Valéry, Great Gardens of America by Tim Richardson, The Gardens of the Vatican by Kildare Dobbs, Encyclopedia of Exotic Plants for Temperate Climates by Will Giles, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants by John Vaughan and Catherine Geissler, Bob Flowerdew's Complete Fruit Book, An Irishman's Cuttings by Charles E. Nelson, Flowers of the Louvre by Michel Lis and Béatrice Vingtrinier, Picturing Plants by Gill Saunders, Hugh Johnson in the Garden by Hugh Johnson and Back to the Garden by Ursula Buchan.
and . . .
an Overview of the year's 'best' books by John Akeroyd, Angelica Gray, Charles Elliott, Guy Jones, Rosemary Lindsay, Judith Tankard, Anne de Verteuil, Gregory Long, Charles Quest-Ritson, Marta McDowell and Elspeth Thompson.
