Gardens That Make You Want to Applaud
May 26th, 2015
I didn’t think I liked Italian-style gardens as much as, say, a perennial border exploding with season-changing color or a mixed garden of cutting-edge shrubs.
Villa Cicogna Mozzoni features a fine example of a classic Italian Renaissance garden.
Italian gardens always seemed too formal, too green and too contrived to me, not to mention a heckuva lot of trimming work.
But after 8 days of picking my jaw off the stone paths of some of northern Italy’s best gardens, I’m an Italiano convert.
The classic Italian style may be formal, green and contrived, but it’s also more impressive than any other kind of garden – especially some of the villa gardens built by Italy’s richest citizens dating to the 1500s.
These folks weren’t interested in having visitors stroll through their landscapes, admiring the peonies, sniffing the jasmine, and concluding, “Nice garden.”
They wanted you to be awe-struck at first glance and immediately realize how much money they had to spare on imposing Goddess Diana statues and grand granite staircases.
Many of these Renaissance-era gardens still stand and still impress. (To see what some of them look like, check out my photo gallery of the Gardens and Villas of the Italian Lakes.)
Tall Italian cypresses line the main axis at the back of Giardino Giusti.
One of the best examples our Lowee’s Tours/Collette Vacations group saw was Verona’s Giardino Giusti, a 16th-century villa (more like a mansion) that sits on a steep hillside.
Tall, skinny, pointy-topped Italian cypresses pierce the sky and line a long stepped path that takes you high up to a shaded belvedere. From there, you can overlook the whole geometric and sculpture-dotted network of clipped evergreens.
It’s all very precise and green… virtually no blooms other than a few sprays of roses and a scattering of potted annuals.
Yet this garden is as impressive as any for its sheer scope and form, just as imposing looking up from below as it is looking down from above.
The message it sends is that man is in charge here. Also, that the deer battle can be won if you have enough money to build 30-foot stone walls.
Impressive in a similar way were the 18-foot-tall boxwood walls at Valsanzibio Gardens near Padua, which like Giardino Giusti, is still in private family hands.
Two gardeners spend 9 months every year doing nothing but trimming the thousands of English boxwoods that make up the walls and a massive boxwood maze. The gardeners use a combination of gas- and hand-powered shears, going over each area three times in two different directions with the aid of a towering three-legged wooden ladder.
Trimming 18-foot-tall boxwood walls is a monumental effort.
Valsanzibio also has a series of stone walls, sculptures and fountains lined up precisely along a straight-path axis system – another hallmark of the classic Italian Renaissance garden.
Villa del Balbianello is yet another landscape theater, this one situated on a rocky peninsula that bubbles out of Lake Como at the base of the Swiss Alps foothills.
Gardeners somehow managed to create lush terraced gardens and lawns on this rocky cliff, including a gorgeous mature evergreen oak that’s meticulously carved into a giant umbrella. And we whine about having to deal with a slope in the backyard…
Not all Italian gardens are formal, clipped-evergreen layouts, though.
The plant-lovers in our group especially liked Villa Carlotta on Lake Como and Villa Taranto on Lake Maggiore.
Both of those are botanic gardens that show off the spectacular range of plants that can be grown in northern Italy’s lakes region.
Though this region is backdropped by the snow-covered Swiss Alps, the valley setting and moderating effect of the big lakes create a subtropical climate.
Carlotta, for example, has a desert-like, terraced cactus and succulent garden that’s just around the corner from a bamboo grove and shaded hillside of tree ferns that looks like a page from a Caribbean rain forest.
Taranto has everything from South African palms to North American birch trees.
The Alpinum Garden overlooks Lake Maggiore.
And halfway up the Alps foothills along Lake Maggiore where the temperature drops is the Alpinum Garden, a superb collection of dwarf perennials and rock-garden plants from all around the world.
This little-known garden has the added benefit of a great view of both the snow-capped Alps beyond and Lake Maggiore below.
My favorite Italian garden was a classic, 10-terrace landscape built around a Baroque royal palace on Isola Bella, a private island in Lake Maggiore.
Hydrangeas and climbing roses dominate the terraces that step down from an ornate central landing at the peak of the island’s back end.
This wall looks impressive and screens out the neighbors as well.
What’s incredibly impressive is the stonework, steps and statuary of this unique, historic place. We’re talking 30-foot-tall sculptures of Greek gods, granite staircases, and walls that look like they were rolled down from the sky.
That’s impressive. Even weeds would look glorious in this setting.
It’s the kind of effort that makes you want to applaud and tell someone, “Bravo!”