Venetian Gardens by Monty Don & Derry Moore

Author:Monty Don & Derry Moore [Don, Monty & Moore, Derry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473533028
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2022-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

The grove of tamarisk trees with their black trunks and thin shoots are very simple but exceptionally beautiful. A piece of gardening genius.

The garden skirts around the archeology almost as though, head averted, it is pretending not to notice. A long, long pergola carrying a vine runs from a large white stone fountain in front of the house that spills with bedding plants rather than water and leads to more expanses of grass. A vineyard stretches to one side, also neatly mown. A covered paved area, the pillars supporting wonderfully gnarled wisteria trunks forms another island. It is all a little odd, unsettling even, because it is fascinating and the atmosphere is good even though all the conventional horticultural messages are in a strange language.

But there are two truly wonderful things. The first, a swimming pool elevated up on a great mound of soil made from the excavated spoil from the monastery, is inspired. At either end a great pine centres and shades the view and the banks of the mound are sculpted with clipped clouds of bay and pittosporum. Alessio, the gardener at Baslini, told me that there is salt water just 60cm below the surface ‘which makes growing most plants very difficult’. If that is so, how much more difficult it must be to create a swimming pool deep enough to be worthy of the name. So the order of things is reversed. The building with all its hints at huge and heavy stone substance is sunk underground and the pool, whose waters are almost invariably down below ground level is set up high on a great earthen tumulus in order that it might have the luxury of depth.

The second thing is alone worth the trip to Torcello. Like so many pieces of garden genius it is startlingly simple: just a grove of tamarisk trees in a grid, their black trunks rising clean from mown grass, their branches pollarded hard so each sprouts a thicket of thin branches carrying feathery, almost effervescent foliage. The trunks, once all straight, now slope and cant this way and that, sending shadows crossing diagonally across the grass. Tamarisk are both very wind resistant and also will tolerate high levels of salt. Their fine, thin foliage means that their demand for water is much less than many trees and they have deep roots that will find what water there is. All in all they are ideally suited to Torcello, with its exposed, salty position and scorching dry summers. Thus the combination of extreme practicality and startling simplicity has made a piece of breathtaking gardening land art.

The campanile of the Torcello Cathedral framed in the garden gate.

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