Ed tells her we'd like to learn more about what's growing on the land. Perhaps she could show us the mescolanza, the edible greens. Would she mind?
“Ah, sì, sì, certo,” Yes, certainly she will. She waves her stick again and disappears behind the ginestre.
I yank tender clumps of weeds from the rose bed and dig out evil, thorny ones. The wheelbarrow fills over and over, and the pile way out on the land grows larger than a haystack. When the terrace brush is cut, other haystacks rise. After the next rain, Ed and Beppe will burn them. Dry weeds create a fire hazard so after every rain in early summer, fires start up all over the valley, ruining the just-washed air. The fires always scare me, even though they stand by with buckets of water in case the wind lifts the fire over to dry grass. This spring an experienced farmer burned to death when the blaze suddenly blew back, catching his clothes on fire.
With my stoop-labor fork I loosen the soil. The beds are ready. Time to plant. We loaded the car with flowers at the nurseries yesterday and the day before. Each time we leave, we're given a gift. The signora runs out, “Un omaggio e grazie.” She hands me a campanula, or terrace rose, or a fuchsia. Twice we've been given a burgundy red coleus, a plant I don't fancy. They look like what would survive after a nuclear blast. Naturally, they're thriving in their far corner. Sometimes we're asked to choose something we want. After rampaging through, buying dozens of plants, suddenly it's difficult to select the gift. One of these small pots from two years ago has turned into a bush covered with yellow blooms which last for two months.
Many businesses give customers gifts—a T-shirt to celebrate a store's anniversary, beautiful calendars at the new year, and, once, a box of fifteen different pastas when we spent more than 200,000 lire, around $120, at a discount store.
I somehow love the gift plants even more than what I've bought. A scented geranium given last year has tripled in size, a dwarf lavender seems especially fragrant. Maybe the gift aspect makes me care for them more carefully, or maybe something given naturally thrives. I'm even growing fond of the coleus.
After working outside all day, the last task remains. We prime the hand pump and trudge out to douse the lavender and new cypress trees with the icy water. Once established, they won't need watering. The walk toward the lake view, formerly a jungle, then a path, now is a lane. Next year, more grapes on the right side (too late for planting grapes now) and a trail of lavender along the left.
Ed has eggplant parmigiana in the oven. While I bathed and fell into reading the poems of Horace in the tub, he picked lettuce and set the table outside. Is there anything more splendid than a man who cooks? I bring my new yellow book, where I have begun to list garden ideas. Before we launch into that all-night topic, I read him something amazing I found in Horace:
. . . In spring the swelling earth aches for seeds of new life.
Lovely the earth in labor, under a nervous west wind.
The fields loosen, a mild wetness lies everywhere.
Confident grows the grass, for the young sun will do no harm.
The shoots of the vine do not fear a southerly storm arising
Or icy rain slanting from heaven under a north wind—
No, bravely they bud now and reveal their leaves.
So it was since the beginning of the world,
Here is the brilliant dawning and pitch of these days.
I love the last two lines. Horace could sit at our table, not having to ask that we keep his glass full of the local wine, while he tells us how little has changed and that we need to thin the fruit in the pear trees.
We assess the current state of the land. Right away, we found the good bones. After bringing back what was already here, although smothered by vines and brush, we are starting our more ambitious phase of gardening with the original structure in place. In Renaissance and later formal gardens, a central axis usually boldly joined the architecture of the house with that of the garden. Walkways were like halls, with glimpses into the interior of the garden from the paths. The perpendicular dimensions of our own front garden approximate the size of the house, with the terraces above and below roughly half the width of the front garden. Vestigial formality remains in the long boxwood hedge with five round topiary trees rising at intervals out of the hedge.
It's time to regard the garden long range, feel my way toward a philosophy of gardening. I visualize how it looks from the third-floor windows, what has lasted these first few years, and, primarily, what truly gives me pleasure, rather than simply what will grow. Ed is interested in what brings bees and butterflies. Because lavender is a magnet, especially for white butterflies, we've seen how they put the garden in motion. Motion and music—the bees' humming forms a sleepy background for the birds' twitters, arpeggios, and caws. I like cut flowers in the house every day. We both love the currents of scents swimming through the garden and how they rise to the house early in the morning. The ripe peach colors of the house rhyme with yellow, rose, and apricot flowers.
Because the land is steeply terraced, our garden has distinct parts:
At the side of the house, the shady rectangle we call the Lime Tree Bower stretches maybe sixty feet, then turns into fruit and olive terraces. We've given every area a name, to save each other the bother of saying, “You know, beyond the lilac bushes on the way to the view of the lake,” or “On the east side of the house under the tigli trees . . .” We've even named each olive tree. All our family members and friends, favorite writers and places are immortalized with a tree. We haven't yet checked to see which ones passed away in the freeze.
Because of the view over the valley and Apennines, the Lime Tree Bower is our noontime outdoor dining room. The front yard, where we live from breakfast to the last firefly count, leads to stone steps then down into a long garden. On this broadest terrace, called the Rose Walk, we have now planted fifty roses on either side of the lawn. I'm confused to see the volunteer, lush lawn, which thrives with a variety of hearty wild grasses. How do you have a lawn without planting a lawn? The top of the immense Polish wall, which we built in the second year, lines one side of this garden. An original stone wall and the inherited boxwood hedge with its ball topiaries line the other. Iron arches mark either end, one covered with jasmine, the other to be planted with two Mermaids, a climbing rose with a flat yellow bloom.
So a slight geometry is in place. While we were clearing jungle growth from the years of abandonment, we followed the cue of the boxwood and reestablished a well-defined rectangle perpendicular to the house. There, during the wall-building era, we unearthed a portion of a former road, with tightly packed stones laid sideways. We hauled away one level, but the next level still lies beneath the grass. I've read that Roman roadbeds were sometimes twelve feet deep.
To the left, curving stone stairs lead down to the Well Walk, another swath of front garden where the well and cistern live and where, previously, we had the well-established hedge of lavender, rosemary, and sage. We didn't know to cut back hard in the winter. At a California vineyard with extensive lavender, we saw the gardener cutting it back beyond belief, almost to the ground. Because we'd never trimmed, the freeze killed all but two.
To the right from the Rose Walk is The Lane, with the boxwood and a tall stone wall on either side. The green underfoot seems to be mostly camomile and wild mint, whose oregano-peppermint smell, I'm sure, attracts the black and white snake who has taken up residence under a rock beneath the faucet. The old well and the spring we discovered during our second summer are on The Lane. It ends with a mass of lilac bushes, then, joining the main garden and the driveway, proceeds to what we call the Lake Walk. From there to the end of the property, we have planted the cypresses and lavender. We want to reclaim an overgrown track—medieval, Roman?—which leads eventually into town after joining a Roman road. The immense views are from that far end of the property. Most of the land is given over freely to the olive, fruit, almond, and grape, with a few stretches abandoned to wild broom and rock. Two terraces are for herb
s and vegetables, the first upper terrace for le erbe aromatiche, and for lettuces, the second for Anselmo's realm, his mega-orto, his grand illusion.
I have visions for all these areas. Making a sketch persuades us that we know what we're doing. “Think perennials,” Ed says. “We can't reinvent the wheel every year—we plant a carload and it doesn't do zip. We need plants that can take care of themselves when they grow up. Remember the summer I spent hours hauling buckets to those thirty olives?” We'd planted on various far terraces, not knowing we'd have no rain that year from May through August. With five acres, quantity and size are whole different issues. We've been slow to adjust our sense of scope. Finally we're getting it—our sense of scale needs to cube itself. “Think bushes.” He starts a list: hibiscus, forsythia, holly, oleander.
“I don't like oleander. It reminds me of freeways.”
“Scratch oleander, then.”
“What about more roses? We could build a running arch all along the top of the Polish wall.”
When we go inside, an e-mail has arrived from my friend Judy, a rose expert. “Mermaid alert. Beware of Mermaid. It's liable to grow forty feet and it has hideous hooked thorns.”
Too late. Two innocent Mermaids are ready to go in the ground tomorrow.
I'm thinking tonight of Humphrey Repton. He is an ancestor of mine on my father's side. My great-grandmother was Elizabeth Repton Mayes, whose memory is preserved only in my middle name and in a photograph of her cradling my newborn grandfather in her arms. He must have been the ugliest baby born in England at the end of the nineteenth century. He's glaring fiercely at the camera, already full of will. He waves his tight little fists, while she looks lovingly down at him. When he was still a small boy, she died. His father went to America and later sent for his son, who travelled across the Atlantic at nine carrying a small suitcase and a bag of apples. He watched from the railing as his aunt Lily receded on the English shore and finally disappeared. I've remained heartless to this story—impossible that cold, bossy Daddy Jack ever was a vulnerable child travelling alone to a foreign country. Instead, I see him tearing around the deck, terrorizing his fellow-passengers.
Farther back in Elizabeth's line was Humphrey Repton (1752–1818), a garden designer who popularized what we know as the English garden. Since my grandfather was a tyrant, I like knowing earlier men in the lineage loved flowers and trees. Humphrey's father was a tax collector; maybe he had someone to rebel against, too.
Instinctively, my preferences are toward blowsy, abundant, spilling flower beds with everything about to bolt across the grass. I like blue delphinium and foxgloves tall enough to arc and sway in the slightest breeze. There should be plenty of yellow lilies looking back at the sun, and dark gardenia bushes for the evenings, the pure white flowers anticipating the moon. Larkspur, coral bells, love-in-a-mist, strawberry borders, and as many pink roses as possible.
Humphrey wrote five books, plus fifty-seven Red Books, his designs for gardens with transparent overlays showing the after over the before. Even the title of his first book, Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening, tells me a lot about him. Casual, low-key, inviting. Observations, sketches, and hints, after all, offer a lot of leeway—such a different slant from my grandfather's approach to life, he who went to the school of hard knocks, called all my boyfriends “little two-by-fours,” and thought my writing with your head in the clouds was close to a criminal act. Humphrey's English garden style gradually influenced the more rigidly conceived Italian garden design. I'm searching for a blend at Bramasole, along with our own idiosyncratic preferences.
With only a little over an acre of our five devoted to the frivolity of flowers, I know Humphrey would not devote a Red Book to my garden. But I'll take him along as I plan.
During the winter in San Francisco, I began to read about the evolution of the Italian garden. I knew that in ancient times, Pliny wrote about fanciful creatures cut from boxwood, and names spelled out by vines and flowers. His lost garden is thought to be near Città di Castello, just a few miles from Bramasole. During suppers in Pliny's garden, light courses were floated in artificial birds and miniature ships on the surface of a stone pool. As you sat down, a spray of water shot up. His concept of gardens blended sweetly into his version of happiness, a philosophy of otium, life spent in elegant, intellectual freedom.
Propped on pillows in bed while wind swirled the trees and scoured the windows with rain and salty mist, I read Gardens of the Italian Villas by Marella Agnelli, and The Italian Renaissance Garden by Claudia Lazzaro, trying to imagine the decision to build a garden with paths which could be flooded so your guests could drift through the garden in little boats. Some gardens had waterworks which could simulate rain or the wind howling. I was struck with the concept of the garden not only as a setting for the house and a place of pleasure but also a place of surprise and fun—fountains that unexpectedly sprayed you as you passed, and il giardino segreto, the secret garden within a garden. Who would not love the idea of a secret garden? I've planted a double circle of tall sunflowers on a high terrace, making a little round room. They're almost knee high. In July, the big flowers and leaves will almost hide the inner circle. I hope someone's children come to visit. As a child, I would have loved that space. Scherzi d'acqua or giochi d'acqua, water jokes, more than any other aspect of the historical garden, reveal a vast cultural space between us and them. They were a staple of Italian gardens. Rounding a bend, your step on a certain stone would set off a shower, suddenly drenching you. Search the literature; these water jokes were enjoyed and expected. No one went home in a huff over her stained blue silk. I don't know of anyone over ten who would like to be drenched on a tour of my garden. But I'm convinced by water; there must be water in the garden, an element of obvious joy, just as flowers are. Water is music and a place for birds to wash, water is movement and a cool spot for toads.
I take statues for granted in the old Italian gardens. They served ideological purposes, reflecting a philosophical stance or interest, such as theater or music, of the owner. But often, I now realize, they were for pure play, as in the grotto pool at the entrance to the Boboli Gardens in Florence, where three marble children swim and duck each other. As a child I loved the mirrored globe on a pedestal in my grandparents' yard. Looking in it, the oak tree above went wonky and my face distorted crazily. Silver shoots of sunlight reflected so brilliantly that I hoped a fire would start.
Of all the gardens I can think of at home, few are playful. I met a woman in Dayton who has bowling balls scattered around her long sloping garden. Otherwise planted with conventional bushes, the balls certainly surprise. “How did you start collecting bowling balls in the yard?” I asked her.
“I had one. It looked so pretty with the snow on it.” She paused, groping for a reason to state; I realized my mistake in urging her to pin down whimsy with some rational explanation. “Anyone can plant flowers,” she continued. Long wicked pause. “It takes a real gardener to have balls.”
The traditional urge for garden ornaments persists in Tuscany. Olive oil jars, topped with pots of geraniums, decorate country gardens. An iron fence around a house in Camucia is decorated with musical notes. At garden supply departments, statuary is easy to find—David (gross in terra-cotta), Flora, Venus, the four seasons, various nymphs, the Seven Dwarfs. In antique shops, I see sublime travertine fountains with Latin inscriptions and garden ornaments too valuable to be left outside.
The whimsy of the eternal Italian topiary craze, too, seems to come from a great distance. I imagine Ed on a ladder, snipping our ball-shaped topiaries into ships, dragons, the Pope, a deer complete with antlers. One Medici palazzo had boxwood in shapes of wolf, dog, ram, hare, elephant, boar, and other creatures. A house in Camucia has topiary squirrels at the entrance. A neighbor's topiary I finally decided is a peacock. Why not a Ferrari, a glass of wine, the “finger,” or a soccer goal?
While reading about the great old Italian gardens, mentally I wandered through the local garde
ns of my Cortona neighbors, who emulate on a modest scale many of the traditions of the grand historical gardens—paths of river pebbles; little or no lawn; pots, pots, pots for flowers and lemon trees arranged around the garden; aviaries; box or laurel hedges; and shady arbors for dining outdoors. I've never seen roses bloom the way they do in Tuscany. They tend to be planted along a fence or—oddly—just off to themselves in a row. Flower beds and rolling lawns hardly exist; they require what Tuscans instinctively conserve: water. A small garden may have fifty pots of various sizes as well as a limonaia for citrus, geraniums, and hydrangeas. Cortona's park starts with a shady area of benches and bordered flower beds around a playful fountain of nymphs entwined with sea creatures. Beyond that area, the park, called the Parterre, stretches a third of a mile along a wall with long views over Lago Trasimeno and the valley. A gesture toward a formal garden remains in the linden-lined walk which is broad enough for two carriages to pass, though now it is only walkers and joggers. While I haven't seen a hilltown park as lovely as Cortona's, many medieval towns have parks just outside the gates, respites for the citizens from the heated stones and cramped streets.
The Italian concept of severe geometric gardens contradicts all my innate preferences. At heart, theirs is an entirely different design aesthetic. Historically, flowers play a minor role compared to statues, patterns of walkways, fountains, hedges, pergolas, and pavilions.
The Italian garden, Ippolito Pindemonte wrote back in 1792, was “ruled more by sun and marble than by grass and shade.” Wandering in gardens here, I've felt their austerity, a forlorn quality to the squared-off compartments and the endless boxwood terraces. They seem anti-nature. But by slow osmosis, I've grown to like the architectural and conceptual sense of space, how often garden layout reproduces the proportions of the house, and the statues, stairways, and balustrades create the sense of outdoor rooms. This is the Mediterranean, where people live outside as much as in. In the large gardens, these strict arrangements of nature give way to orchards or woods, the last buffers between the house and wild nature, a fine idea that crosses time and architectural styles. The early garden writers refer to gardening as “third nature,” first nature being the natural wild, second nature being agricultural cultivation, and third being nature in sync with ideas of beauty and art.
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