Touring the gardens of Italy

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Italy's Private Gardens: An Inside View

Helena Attlee, with photographs by Alex Ramsay

Helena Attlee and her photographer husband Alex Ramsay have been documenting gardens for some years – in Britain, Italy, Portugal, and beyond – their books being sumptuous introductions to each country’s horticultural wonders. More recently, Attlee has been leading garden tours to Italy as well, and the inspiration for this book was her personal communication with their owners and gardeners. The result is a garden book far more personal than most, and one with a great deal of discussion and conversation, as we get to meet the personalities behind the gardens.

Ramsay fully deserves the equal billing. His photographs make up at least half the book, and they are wonderful. Some are double-page spreads, sweeping views of perfect gardens and their landscapes beyond; others capture the details of garden corners, or the natural designs of trees and plants. Everything is perfect. The wistaria – and there’s a lot of it – is always flowering abundantly, and photographed at the peak of flowering perfection. Pools suffer no unwanted weed, grass is always green, and the sun always shining. Ramsay catches light as it falls behind or through the trees and flowers. Italy is almost a never-never land, a total perfection of gardens, season and weather. 

Yet what really makes this book so interesting is the human portraiture. Owners, gardeners, designers, children and dogs are captured in both image and word, along with their creations and responsibilities. There are the Principessa, the Contessa, the Marchese, the descendants or purchasers of ruined buildings and neglected estates who have had the vision to restore them to life and beauty once again.  And there are the gardeners, young and old, self-consciously handsome or shy in front of a camera. Many are long serving, like the two brothers who started working at La Pietra over 50 years ago. If there’s a theme to what they tell us, it is that their challenges of rejuvenation, creation or maintenance were always worth undertaking.

The selection includes gardens familiar and unfamiliar. Ninfa (Lazio), a garden built in the ruins of a town derelict for centuries, was one I would expect to find – and indeed, here it is. And also, as expected, are a selection of gardens in Tuscany.  One less well-known example is the semi-wild garden belonging to Jane and Francesco da Mosta, just a patch of land on a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon, a hideaway which acts as a refuge from the city. Unusually for a book on this topic, there are generous examples from Sicily, gardens replete with giant cacti and palm trees like so many living sculptural designs.

There is only one criticism that I could make of this book: it’s so much a tribute to the individuals featured that it can only document and praise, advise and encourage – the author is never critical about anything! 

Italy’s Private Gardens: An Inside View by Helena Attlee, with photographs by Alex Ramsay is published by Frances Lincoln 2010. 208 pp. 150 colour illus.  ISBN: 9780711229105