revisiting

Wharton is right: were you to put ten of these stone dogs in your garden, it would just look naff.

I.

This past winter, I came across Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens (New York: The Century Co., 1904).  Generations of schoolchildren no doubt know her primarily as the author of Ethan Frome or The Age of Innocence, but she also wrote enthusiastically about design, and created a garden on a grand scale at her Massachussetts estate, The Mount.  I've never had much desire to visit The Mount.  But as I leafed through the pages of Italian Villas and Their Gardens, I found myself agreeing with Wharton.

"The cult of the Italian garden has spread from England to America," she wrote at the beginning of the last century, "and there is a general feeling that, by placing a marble bench here and a sun-dial there, Italian 'effects' may be achieved."  (Here I imagined every kitschy terra-cotta garden ornament ever sold at Lowe's.)  However, for Italian gardens "to be a real inspiration, they must be copied, not in the letter but in the spirit.  That is, a marble sarcophagus and a dozen twisted columns will not make an Italian garden; but a piece of ground laid out and planted on the principles of the old garden-craft will be, not indeed an Italian garden in the literal sense, but, what is far better, a garden as well adapted to its surroundings as were the models that inspired it" (11-12).  I'm more sympathetic than Wharton, but she is right: however much you might have loved your Italian vacation, you can't truly recreate it at home; you always must do justice to the place and time in which you find yourself.

II.

Two years ago, for my birthday, we spent the weekend visiting private and public gardens in and around Florence.  Visiting the former is easier than it sounds: you just phone up the owners, knock on the door, or ring the bell, and you find a relatively obliging attitude of stewardship rather than ownership.  Pay a nominal fee, and you are free to look around.  We rode wheezing city buses out through the Florentine sprawl to see the Medici villas of Castello and Pestraia (Wharton rightly sniffed at their “impersonal official look”).  Better were the days when I rang up an elderly princess to ask if we might view her city garden (she acceded), and when we braved the Italian roads to drive up to the hill towns and down to the southernmost part of Tuscany.

Medici villa in Fiesole 

Those three days were the most concentrated period of beauty I have ever known.  Even as I experienced that weekend, I knew it would pass into legend in my own life, and I begin to memorialize things as they happened: I will never in my life see a garden so beautiful; I will remember this drive when I am ninety and confined to bed; I will never again be in a place so quiet and so calm; there could be no dessert so deliciously creamy as this marscapone.  It is a different thing, I think, to taking photographs: so often, it seems that you photograph to have proof of experiencing things, but wind up experiencing only the taking of photographs.  What I mean is a consciousness marked by poignancy, where the pleasure of seeing and experiencing is both amplified and made bittersweet by the knowledge that the moment is irreplaceable, that it cannot be done over.


(I told you that I always like to be the most pessimistic person at any table.)

But here is some optimism for you: That week was marked by a series of weather catastrophes that had welcome, glorious results for me.  The ash cloud shut down all air traffic in Europe, and that gift from the Icelandic gods bought an extra three days.  On the way down to the garden at La Foce, once home to the Anglo-American author Iris Origo, we decided to stop in Montepulciano for lunch.  I had the name of a restaurant that I particularly wanted to try; and so we determinedly wound up and up and around the hill in our tiny car - but as it happened, we parked, stepped outside, heard a clap of thunder directly overhead, and, just as the rain came down, sprinted instead into the nearest building.  - It happened to be a restaurant, which happened to serve the most delicious hot soup and pasta.  We could not have eaten better elsewhere.  After lunch, the downpour obligingly ceased, and we continued south, driving along narrow ribbons of roads, through rolling fields and in between tall cypress trees; in the summer, I knew, these roads would be sluggish with tour buses, but I remember it being just the two us that April, our speed graceful and steady.  It was a long winter that year, one that kept me shivering in my thin trench even in Rome, and when we got toLa Foce, we found that we had arrived before the spring.  The air was raw and it began to spit rain while we walked around the house; our guide was telling us that it had snowed only two weeks before - when, suddenly, it began to hail.  Hail!  A long, wisteria-covered tunnel supposedly allowed Origo to walk through the garden in the strong Italian sun without her pale skin burning; and though I was sympathetic, as the sleet came down, I found myself wishing for just a little sunlight.  We scrambled back inside, where I glumly prepared to depart.  Then, suddenly, the sleet stopped, the clouds parted, and the guide told us that we were welcome to go back and look around by ourselves.

Like many Italian gardens, La Foce was carved out of an imperfect space: a steep hillside, the road close by.  That awkward shape, jutting forward into the road, was cleverly accentuated with clipped yew, while tall cypress trees hid the road, so that it felt like being on the prow of a very private ship sailing forward into the Val d'Orcia beyond.  Through stacked terraces and plants tucked into walls or grown up supports, designer Cecil Pinset had made use of every inch of space.  Now, in early spring, the garden was dressed in deep purple and soft lilac and white that picked up the shades in the stone of the walls and steps.  

III.

But nothing compared to Gamberaia.

“The villa stands nobly on a ridge overlooking the village of Settignano and the wide-spread valley of the Arno" (38).

Once again, Gamberaia is a garden that is miraculously, astonishingly open to the public, at least if it's only two of you on a mid-April morning: you ring a bell at the entrance gate; a housekeeper emerges from a building on the left, silently takes your money and leaves you to wander through the garden by yourself.  You continue walking down a long allee of trimmed cypress trees, trimmed and angled to maximize the illusion of length.  The house, a newish yellow stucco square, is at the end; the original was destroyed, burnt or blown up, in 1944.

Gamberaia, says Wharton, stands out, “even in Italy, where small and irregular pieces of ground were so often utilized with marvelous skill" as "probably the most perfect example of the art of producing a great effect on a small scale" (38).  We agreed: there was no garden quite like Gamberaia.

I'm going to let Wharton speak for a bit:

          
 “Before the façade of the house a grassy terrace bounded by a low wall, set alternately with stone vases and solemn-looking stone dogs, overhangs the vineyards and fields, which, as in all unaltered Tuscan country places, come up close to the house.  Behind the villa, and running parallel with it, is a long grass alley or bowling-green, flanked for part of its length by a lofty retaining-wall set with statues, and for the remainder by high hedges which divide it on one side from the fish-pond garden and on the other from the farm.  The green is closed at one end by a grotto of coloured pebbles and shells, with nymphs and shepherds in niches about a fountain.  This grotto is overhung by the grove of ancient cypresses for which the Gamberaia is noted.  At its opposite end the bowling-green terminates in a balustrade whence one looks down on the Arno and across to the hills on the southern side of the valley. 

“The retaining-wall which runs parallel with the back of the house sustains a terrace planted with cypress and ilex. ... Just opposite the central doorway of the house the retaining wall is broken, and an iron gate leads to a slit of a garden, hardly more than twenty feet wide, on a level with the bowling-green.  This narrow strip ends also in a grotto-like fountain with statues, and on each side balustrade flights of steps lead to the upper level on which the ilex-grove is planted.  This grove, however, occupies only one portion of the terrace.  On the other side of the cleft formed by the little grotto-garden, the corresponding terrace, formerly laid out as a vegetable garden, is backed by the low façade of the lemon-house, or stanzone, which is an adjunct of every Italian villa.  Here the lemon and orange trees, the camellias and other semi-tender shrubs, are stored in winter, to be set out in May in their red earthern jars on the stone slabs which border the walks of all old Italian gardens.

         

 “The plan of the Gamberaia has been described thus in detail because it combines in an astonishingly small space, yet without the least sense of overcrowding, almost every typical excellence of the old Italian garden: free circulation of sunlight and air about the house; abundance of water; easy access to dense shade; sheltered walks with different points of view; variety of effect produced by the skillful use of different levels; and, finally, breadth and simplicity of composition.

“Here, also, may be noted in its fullest expression that principle of old gardening which the modern ‘land-scapist’ has most completely unlearned, namely, the value of subdivision of spaces.  Whereas the modern gardener’s one idea of producing an effect of space is to annihilate his boundaries, and not only to merge into one another the necessary divisions of the garden, but also to blend this vauge whole with the landscape, the old garden-architect proceeded on the opposite principle, arguing that, as the garden is but the prolongation of the house, and as a house containing a single huge room would be less interesting and less serviceable than one divided according to the varied requirements of its inmates, so a garden which is merely one huge outdoor room is also less interesting and less serviceable than one which has logical divisions.  ... Aesthetic impressions were considered, and the effect of passing from the sunny fruit-garden to the dense grove, thence to the wide-reaching view, and again to the sheltered privacy of the pleached walk or the messy coolness of the grotto – all this was taken into account by a race of artists who studied the contrast of aesthetic emotions as keenly as they did the juxtaposition of dark cypress and pale lemon-tree, of deep shade and level sunlight.  But the real value of the old Italian garden-plan is that logic and beauty meet in it, as they should in all sound architectural work.  Each quarter of the garden was placed where convenience required, and was made accessible from all the others by the most direct and rational means; and from this intelligent method of planning the most varying effects of unexpectedness and beauty were obtained.

“It was said above that lawns are unsuited to the Italian soil and climate, but it must not be thought that the Italian gardeners did not appreciate the value of turf.  They used it, but sparingly, knowing that it required great care and was not a characteristic of the soil.  The bowling-green of Gamberaia shows how well the beauty of a long stretch of greensward was understood…” (Wharton, 38, 41-42, 45-48).

I readily showed you photographs of those other gardens, but I found myself not wanting to post photos of Gamberaia, because none of them convey what I remember to be the most extraordinary, elegant garden I've ever seen.  Looking at the photographs now, I find myself struggling to articulate why we should have found it to be so overwhelmingly our favorite; it is not a dramatic garden, and its slope is not steep, so that the views, too, are calming, not dramatic.  - I suppose it has something to do with the quietness we found there.  It is private without being claustrophobic.  And perhaps it is strange, in a place where the newness of the house speaks to the intrusion of violent events, to the disruption of time, to say: it is a garden that felt timeless, removed from the world. 

IV.

In the gloom and darkness of this past December, I received an email greeting from La Foce. "MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM LA FOCE!" it shouted in red script.  It showed an old photograph: a group of children, equally divided into those who seemed excited and those who appeared about 30 seconds away from whining about the cold; two women, one of whom may have been Iris Origo; and one squat, lumpy snowman.  I stared at it dully.

I was getting ready to leave for Florence just after the New Year, and the automated cheer of that message spurred me to check Italian Villas and Their Gardens out of the library.  I was going for work, but I knew I’d have at least an afternoon to myself, and I thought I might visit some gardens while I was there.  Wharton's chapter on Gamberaia drew me back to what I had already experienced, already known, and I thought that I might visit it again. But I didn't go back to Gamberaia, and instead spent an afternoon wandering up and down the hills of the Boboli Gardens, which were precisely as emotionally uninspiring as Wharton had warned they would be.  I found I couldn't bear to go back.  I don't know what I feared more: that I would find Gamberaia just the same, or that it would be different than I remembered, less spectacular, and my memory left tarnished.  I thought to myself, I will leave it there, waiting on its hillside, just as it was.