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Italian Garden ToursBy Janice Rossen
My mother, along with my cousin Carolyn and my Aunt Harriet, has a passion for gardening. This has been very lucky for everyone in my family, as my mother’s herb garden in the backyard has graced many a meal—it is an informal rule with me that all enthusiastic gardeners are excellent chefs. (This is not to mention my father’s avocado, lemon, orange and tangerine trees, tended over the decades in a Los Angeles climate, and his delectable canes of raspberries and blackberries.) My father, however, is a Fly-fisherman, first and last. Years of family vacations to various streams, lakes and rivers in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana have marked this enthusiasm, and it, too, is a quite special gift. What my Aunt Harriet introduced to my mother was the opportunity for her own absorbing passions—both for gardening and for travel—to take wings to Italy. Strictly speaking, this has been the gift of the American Horticultural Society, a long-standing and venerable institution, which offers Study Tours to various parts of the globe. Eventually, even I (giving a plaintive cry of ‘I am not a gardener!’) have been to lyrically beautiful gardens, ranging from Roman villas to Savoyard formal gardens to Sicilian citrus groves.
The other feature of traveling with gardeners to see gardens is the astonishing breadth of knowledge that they display. We all have different styles of learning and perceiving, of course; some members of the tour wrote everything down in notebooks, or documented the gardens they were seeing with photographs, peppering the head gardener with technical questions. Others appeared merely to stroll, taking it all in; but later in the evening, over dinner, they could explain to you why a certain hedgerow had been clipped in the way that it had, or why a stream had been diverted. I asked endless questions about arranging flowers—which I find the most accessible of this art form—but also about the theory behind gardening, or, rather, its basic elements. It turns out to be as complicated as I had thought. You must think long-term, seasonally, and consider how a garden will change over time (‘do not over-plant,’ they cautioned). Fundamentally, you can’t grow anything so well in any given spot if it does not thrive in that environment. Soil, they told me, is crucial.
For my part, I was most enchanted with the picturesqueness of the landscape and the utter luxury of the hotels which were chosen for us. The Hotel Splendido, in Portofino, had a gorgeous deck with flowering plants in pots (as above), looking out over a view of the bay (as below).
The wood floors echoed down the hallways with the music of the hotel’s brilliant pianist, Salvatore, who played everything from Cole Porter to Jacques Brel to Elton John to poignant Italian romantic ballads. For me, the skilled performances I heard were the highlight of these trips (although I am not a gardener, I am a musician). That is part of the reason for traveling, I think—is to connect, across cultural boundaries, with others whose souls are moved by the same aesthetic passions. And I have to say (though this is a dreadful stereotype), the Italians whom I met were incurably polite and, more than that, friendly. One delightful musician in the Hotel Borromeo (where the pianist was also an illumination, and sheer joy to listen to) joined me for an impromptu dance, on the marble floors under the chandeliers in the hotel lobby. I even got to achieve my life-time ambition, for one evening at the Hotel Splendido, and become a Torch Singer. (What supreme courtesy!) And I think, also, that a window opened for me on the vexed subject of gardening, which I was striving to comprehend as an art form. My friend Tawnya, an art student, always says, ‘Make friends with your medium,’ and indeed one must understand a great deal about varieties of plants and caring for and arranging them. My fellow travelers on these garden tours had all done exactly that: they knew their stuff. But they were also not afraid to try new things, to experiment. One ingenious gardener, David, told me that he once planted the same plant in six different locations in his garden, to see where it felt the most at home. Traveling is, in many ways, the antithesis of gardening, where you are settling in a plant in some beautiful arrangement with other plants—also, trees and rocks and stone walls and water features and the occasional garden statue or bench . . . . . but perhaps it is not. Part of the history of gardening has to do with imports and exports, sometimes with happy results, sometimes with disastrous ones. Fundamentally, it has to do with people, who tend and shape and create a specific environment out of the landscape.
I feel very privileged to have traveled in the company of such knowledgeable people, who answered all of my questions, and also inspired me to appreciate the complexities of gardening. (Our tour leader, Susie Orso, is beyond praise, for organizing all of this.) In the end, the Italian adventures must have had a profound effect on me, as I returned to the inhospitable climate of Austin, Texas, and fearlessly planted a small garden of lantana, bi-coloured iris and enormous, exuberant bushes of rosemary. A year later, it is still thriving. That is the best souvenir I think I could have. Photographs by Janice Rossen Special thanks to my favorite traveling companions, who shared these adventures: my mother, Midge, and also Kurt and Hannah, Sheryl, Nancy, Fran, Charles and Dancy, Carl and Gay, and Susie; also, the hosts of all the private gardens we visited, and Maria, who gave me a divine jar of homemade lemon marmalade. Further information and contact numbers: Hotel Splendido, Viale Baratta 16, 16034 Portofino, Italy, tel. +39.01.85.26.78.02 Grand Hotel Timeo, Via Teatro Greco, 59, 98039 Taormina, Italy, tel. +39.02.26.83.01.02 |
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Gardeners, in my experience, are a very unique and special
group of people. Gardening is a passion that can’t be taught or imparted in any
way—I would rank it, really, on the order of a gift of artistry in the way that
some people are musicians and some are chefs and others are athletes. Like all
professions, landscape design has its own standards and vocabulary, not to
mention its own heroic figures. It is also universal, in the sense that it cuts
across national boundaries. It has to do with particular climates (you can’t
grow some plants in some places, though some gardeners love the challenge it
implies). It has also the poignancy of a terrifyingly transient art form: an
owner and designer can devote years to the shaping of a garden, only to have it
vanish like the wind, when there is no one left to tend it.
If I am moved to tell this tale, you will understand at
once that I speak of mysteries which I do not understand. But I would like to
share my experiences of these travels, both from the perspective of what I have
seen, traveling in company with this formidable group, and from what I have
learned along the way. For instance, the garden pictured above (which is a
private garden, although a book has been published about it) was designed by a
man whose name you will hear uttered with deep respect by the gardening crowd:
Russell Page. He thought in terms of landscapes, of pools of water cascading in
so artful a way that they seem to be entirely natural, and of transitions
between Country House, surrounding formal garden, and farmland beyond it. Every
solution that he brought to a gardening problem was original and creative, and
he was invited all over the world to work his magic. The garden in front of the
Frick Museum in New York City is his work, for instance, sketched—as was his
trademark way of working—in its rudiments on the back of an old envelope.
An American Horticultural Society trip to the north of
Italy, where we stayed first on Lake Maggiore, then in the city center of Turin,
and finally in the charming village of Portofino, brought me to this place. Yet
while the climate was pretty much the same, in the north of Italy, each garden
that we visited was distinctly different. By staying on the lake (very near to
Lake Como, where we all dashed about in a boat, one afternoon), we saw masses of
azaleas, like this one.
They all seemed to be gathering ideas for their own work at
home. Part of the delight for many avid gardeners, it seemed to me, was to
discover plants in a Roman villa that they had at home in their gardens in
California—rosemary and lantana and a certain variety of daisies.
I can’t say enough for the cuisine—the chef produced a
five-course, sit-down dinner for some twenty-five of us that was perfectly
orchestrated, and included a risotto with shaved white truffles that was a work
of art. As in all first-class hotels (at least, in my book), there was a
terrific pianist, who could sing in at least five languages, and (my own
favorite part of his repertoire) performed passionate Italian love songs in duet
with the head waiter, Antonio. The hotel was ineffably elegant in every respect.
My delight could not be surpassed when I discovered that the swimming pool held
salt water, a real rarity, and imparting the illusion that one can swim forever.
The village of Portofino, with its yachts basking in the
sunlight on the bay, looks to be exquisitely well-preserved; the buildings must
be allowed a possible choice of a particular palette of paint colours, which
makes it a bit like Disneyland, in being too perfect. However, we were not
complaining, but climbed to the top of the hill to see the medieval castle
(restored and changed through the years, but still with a heart-breakingly
beautiful view over the water), and dined at an outdoor café facing the tiny
bay.
A very different tour—because of the difference in
terrain—was our jaunt to Sicily, my mother and I, this past spring (2006). I
felt that I had gained something of a gardener’s perspective when I kept
impulsively crying out, at various points, ‘It looks just like California!’ The
full impact of endless hillsides spilling over with groves of lemon trees and
orange trees is difficult to describe. In an astonishing shock to the usual
March climate, we had snow, one day, which covered the mountains.
The most picturesque spot in Sicily where we stayed was the
town of Taormina, which lives under the magnificent presence of Mount Aetna (in
this photograph, though it will be hard to see, covered with snow). Again, I was
dazzled by the hotel which had been chosen for us, the Grand Hotel Timeo, set on
a hillside that held the ruins of a Greek (later modernized by the Romans!)
theatre. Its patio looked out over the bay, and you could see the coastline
below for miles. (Not the least of its attractions, for me, was the frozen
granita—both lemon and a peculiarly delicious espresso—that was served as part
of the breakfast buffet). The staff had placed bowls of fresh lemons all over
the hotel, and the décor was spare, elegant, and supremely restful.
For my part, I like learning things over the dinner table,
when the wine is flowing freely. American Horticultural Tours provide everything
that is delightful, so that acquiring information seems effortless. And besides
gardening, there were incredible ruins and monuments to be seen, especially in
Sicily. I am not even expanding, here, on the ancient Greek temples that we saw
in Sicily, or the Roman villa with endless hunting scenes depicted in mosaics on
the floor, in the middle of the island.