Even though the gardens appear highly artificial to my eyes, trained by Southern lawns of dogwood, azalea, and camellia, and by casual, low-maintenance California gardens, on reflection, they make sense. Italy, until recently, has been utterly fragmented. The castle, walled village, or villa of necessity had an us-against-the-world stance. Gardens, of course, would be enclosed or controlled or designed to make one forget the danger or chaos just beyond the confines.
Over and over, I surrender to the Italian sense of beauty. How to bring the elements I've come to love into my own garden? I want Humphrey's fast and loose arrangements, his rustic sense of comfort and ease. Can I have those along with the Italian geometry and playfulness, those oxymorons that give such a sense of surprise?
Reading about gardens is instructive but frustrating. Photos do not convey depth, and perspective is too limited. Worse, I can't smell the layers of fragrance as my eye follows the paths, can't bend down to rub a furry leaf, or see how a willow in new leaf fractures the light. I was transported only partially by the glossy pages to the grandiose waterworks of the Villa d'Este. The delight and luxury of water spilling from the breasts of women, the mouths of dolphins, the simulated cascades and stepped, downhill courses—the pictures stilled and silenced the gush, splash, and trickle you must bend close to hear.
Two hours in the Roseto Botanico at Cavriglia are worth a whole winter of looking at books. June is an ideal time to see—to smell—the garden of Fondazione Carla Fineschi, the largest private rose garden in the world. I immediately start writing names of roses we like, regardless of the fact that nurseries in our area often don't sell roses with names so we may never find any of these. Every category of rose—Bourbon, Chinese, Damask, Tea, Ramblers, etc.—has its beds and every bush is fully labeled. Ed and I lose each other then meet. Out of the thousands of roses, we hope to identify the two pink ones that belong to the history of our house. We both spot the indecently fragrant Reine des Violettes—similar, but ours are more cupped, like a peony. Maybe the nonna who lived at Bramasole never knew the name, or maybe such an old country rose just doesn't make it into the bloodlines. Let's just call it Nonna's Rose. Finally, we wander, watching the gardeners clip the dead, watching other people swooning over the fragrances. Behind the garden a few roses are sold. We buy three called Sally Holmes to sprawl along the driveway, offering white clusters of flat roses among the lavender. I'm not drawn to white roses but why not have a few to catch the moonlight?
At Firenze Com'era (Florence as it was), one of my favorite museums for its tranquil convent setting and its lack of other visitors, I'm fascinated by the dozen paintings of Medici villas by the Flemish painter, Justus Utens. These half-moons (painted in 1599 for lunettes in a Medici villa at Artimino) depict bird's-eye views of the houses and gardens as they were originally, a rare glimpse at ideal garden layout of that time. Villa Pratolino shows an elaborate sequence of pools spilling downhill into each other. At Lambrogiana's garden, four grand squares, bordered by pergolas, are subdivided into four others, with square pools at the entrance to each big square. The walled courts of all these villas are oddly empty—perhaps a well, but otherwise lacking ornamentation. If I ever win the lottery, I'd like to create a garden on this scale. Ever since the enormous fun I had reading George Sitwell's (papa of the marvelous eccentric writers Osbert, Sacheverell, and Edith) ruminations on his gardens, which involved the creations of hills and lakes, and other ambitious manipulations of the landscape, I've been in awe of gardeners who think on this scale.
The remnant of the Medici Giardino dei Semplici (garden of simples: medicinal plants) is still open to the public in Florence. Since Cosimo the First had the idea for this garden in 1545, botanists have planted specimen ferns, palms, herbs, flowers, and shrubs, as well as studied healing properties of plants. It's a weedy spot behind imposing gates near San Marco. This morning, it's empty, except for a woman wheeling a baby, and a man with a stringy garden hose drowning plants. At his rate, it will take a month to water the garden, which may be why so much of it droops. I take away no ideas from the garden of simples but it is a shady walk out of the heat of Florence, a glimpse back into the awakening of gardening as a subject of study and importance.
The herb garden at San Pietro in Perugia had me taking notes immediately. The San Pietro complex now shares its deserted, pure courtyards, grounds, and austere monks' cells with a university agriculture department. Guidebooks to Umbria don't even mention this peaceful oasis, with its accompanying book (in Italian) explaining the intricate numerology and plant symbolism of the reconstructed medieval meditation garden, which adjoins a clearly laid-out garden of simples. I found that a sticky weed, la parietaria, which sprouts from every crannied wall at our house, has a past. In Latin, it is called elxine, and possesses the powers to expel stones from the urinary tract, heal wounds, and calm colic. Local people have told me it's a chief cause of spring allergy, as well. As I dig out its tenacious roots, I'll have more respect for its existence. A pink version of what I know as yellow oxalis in California is called acetosella. The low, spreading plant Beppe calls morroncello, is labeled pimpinella (sanguisorba in Latin), good for everything from plague to ulcers. Santoreggia, savory, which I thought of as an innocent addition to summer soups and salads, turns out to be a powerful aphrodisiac when mixed with honey and pepper. Even the wild melissa appears in new light: Its leaves produce gold dreams. Since I'm not sure I've ever seen gold light in a dream, I'd like to try this tea. How perfectly blue the flower of borage, a bright spot in a herb garden.
From my reading, I gleaned an unpleasant insight—how unformed and narrow my views of gardening were! In my new yellow book, I'm starting a list of newly realized possibilities for my more mundane-sized garden, beginning with sketches of pergolas. Anyone looking at them might think they're scaffolding or subway tunnels. Almost everyone with a garden in Tuscany has a pergola, not only because they're practical for grapes. Chestnut, stone, willow, iron, they direct a view, provide a focal point, and protect you from the sun, an easy contrast and defining point. Lunching under dangling bunches of grapes imparts a delicious mood of hedonism, while the splashes of sunlight falling over the table make faces beautiful and seduce everyone to enjoy themselves fully. Why have I never built a woven willow pergola in California? I can superimpose one over my memory of the yard of my house in Palo Alto—there behind the house. I should have taken out that ugly juniper hedge and put up a lovely arbor.
I have a practice which must release beneficial rushes of body chemicals, purify the blood, and strengthen the heart. When I can't sleep I imagine holding all the animals I've loved; I revisit my happiest moments; I walk through the streets of Cuzco, San Miguel, Deya, recalling views, windows, faces, sounds. I think of everyone I love unstintingly. To this habit I now can add the revision of the gardens of all the houses I've lived in, budgetary considerations of the time notwithstanding. I'm more accustomed to the revisions of interiors, a large topic among the women of my family, any one of whom might say something like, “I never should have papered that dining room, especially with those Chinese cranes coming in to land. I always feel like one will plop down into my soup. I should have lacquered the walls brilliant yellow and a mirror should go over that sideboard, not those puny sconces. . . .” I wonder if they, when insomnia strikes, have practices like mine.
Formal squares traditionally organize large Italian gardens. I knew that, of course, but did not know that the square was called a quincunx, for its four trees planted at the corners and one at the central point. Ever since Cicero, many gardens are a series of quincunxes linked by paths. Boxwood was the common border but some quincunxes were edged with sage, rosemary, lavender, or myrtle. Within the quincunxes, gardeners planted lilies, roses, and bulbs such as hyacinth, narcissus, and crocus. Pergola walkways worked as boundaries on the sides of the gardens, offering shaded walks.
Reading garden inventories from hundreds of years ago, I see how many of the plants loved then still are—cycl
amen, jasmine, honeysuckle, savory, clematis, anise. Others have fallen from favor: hyssop, mugwort, rue, tansy, melissa, black cumin, sweet cicely, balsam apple, black bryony, and woodbine. Herbs often were used interchangeably with flowers. The iris and the orange lily (giglio selvatico), both of which grow wild at Bramasole, are mentioned frequently, causing me to wonder how long ago they naturalized.
I'm happy that some plants I've chosen are on the lists of common herbs and flowers in Renaissance gardens. Last summer I planted issopo, hyssop, as a border. It rewarded me with long-blooming spiky purple flowers and an ambition to spread into a bush. Francesco recognized it as something good to rub on bruises. Another I planted was melissa, which I then found was the same as the wild mints I'd called lemon balm or citronella. It smelled like the oil my mother used to rub on me in the evenings when mosquitoes swarmed and I played late in the alleys and neighbors' back yards. Now I cut branches and lay them under the table when we eat outside at night. Maybe it helps.
Savory, another mint cousin, I planted by accident. At the market I bought a pot of santoreggia. “Use the flowers and the leaves,” was all the seller told me.
“In what?”
She raised both arms, “In the kitchen, signora. Insalata, zuppa, everywhere.” By chance I came upon a mention of santoreggia as satureja hortensis, the Latin name for savory, and noticed the connection.
Jasmine grows over an arch and along the iron railing on the upstairs terrace. Honeysuckle I also planted early. The scent takes me straight to a white Georgia road in moonlight, when my true love in high school picked a branch and put it in my hair. When we kissed, his mouth was hard and unyielding, then suddenly open and alive. Honeysuckle doesn't dazzle anyone with its flowers, but I can lean out of my study window, look over cypresses and hills and breathe not only the honeyed fragrance but the sand road cooling off behind Bowen's Mill, the wind in long leaf pine, and Royale Lyme aftershave liberally doused on the cheeks of a shy boy years and miles away. I was not shy; I'd been waiting for him to kiss me for weeks.
Southern scents are powerful. I always keep a gardenia pot going in the shade, a connection to the old giant in my mother's yard, a scent I slipped past when coming home late, the green-black leaves and the gardenias so white they seemed to have a nimbus of light around them. I'd pick one and float it in a water glass by my bed. By the time I woke up late the next morning, the scent had invaded every corner of the hot room. My family's garden in Georgia was nothing special, just nice, though by August almost everything looked exhausted. We had camellias, lilies, azaleas, crape myrtle, larkspur, bachelor's buttons, which we called ragged robin, and a back hedge of bridal bouquet. Inside it I had a hideout and would not answer when my mother called from the back door. Through long swoops of white bloom, I could see her fuming. I liked to spy. My other hideout, strategically located near the front door, was under the porch, behind the blue hydrangeas. I could see the postman's hairy leg and black socks, the skirts of my mother's bridge friends, and sometimes hear bits of forbidden conversation about Lyman Carter “running around,” or Martha's shock treatments in Asheville.
Here I have pots of pink and white hydrangeas, the blooms as large as a baby's head. Between two of them Ed built a stone bench, an almost hidden vantage point for viewing our garden, though nothing as exciting as who entered and exited my family's home. We have planted both white and lavender lilac, which has the lovely name lillà in Italian.
The garden, I begin to see, is a place where I can give memory a location and season in which to remain alive. Ed, too, loves the lilac. They grew all over his hometown in Minnesota and, after the harsh winter, must have been a sweet sight. His neighbor Viola Lapinski, an “old maid” (he now realizes she was in her thirties), used to bring bunches when she came over on Saturday nights to watch “Gunsmoke” with his family.
I'll have to ask my daughter, whose first word was “flava,” flower, if she feels a memory imprint from our Somers, New York, back yard of maples, which in autumn dropped knee-deep yellow leaves she and the dog burrowed under. Along the boundary wall, I planted my first herb garden and never since have had one so extensive. Digging beside me one day, she found an amethyst medicine bottle which she kept for years. In the front yard, a peony hedge popped up every year. Ashley thought someone with too much lipstick had kissed the crest of each pink globe. What does she remember? Her room in Palo Alto had one sliding glass wall. She stepped outside every day to mock orange, lemon, kumquat, loquat. The inheritance of those light scents must be floating in the canaliculi of her brain. I wish she had the grape arbor to remember. Perhaps building one here will do.
Scents operate like music and poetry, stirring up wordless feelings that rush through the body, not as cognitive thoughts but as a surge of lymphatic tide. Ed walks by the lilac and simultaneously his mother places the vase of ashen lavender blossoms on the coffee table, his father offers a box of toffee to Viola, whose hair is rolled on orange juice cans in preparation for mass tomorrow, Lawrence Welk starts to bounce, and the room is presided over by the shadowy tones of the framed Jesus over the TV, pausing to look out at everyone from the garden of Gethsemane. His eyes follow you everywhere.
A garden folds memory into the new as well. I have no history with lavender, pots of lemon trees, balconies of tumbling coral geraniums, double hollyhocks shooting up, tree roses, dahlias—but now I see that when (if) I am ninety, a lavender sachet will return to me the day Beppe planted forty lavenders, will bring back summer after summer of white butterflies and bees around the house, dipping in and out of the lavender haze. Probably nothing will stir the memory of the horrid weed that smells like old fish, or the sticky one that makes me rush inside for the allergy tablets.
“If we plant everything you list in your yellow book, we'll live in a botanical garden.”
“Or maybe an Eden.” Ed has told me the etymological root of the word “paradise” comes from the Greek paradeisos, meaning garden or park, and farther back, from dhoigho-, clay or mud wall, and from the Avestan pairi-daeza, meaning circumvallation, walled-around. Paradise: a clay-walled garden. Genesis says nothing about wall-building on any of the seven days, but I can imagine a high perimeter of golden bricks thumb-printed by the hand of God. If He has hands, of course. Was the Eden wall covered with Mermaid, a quick-growth rose? Ours seemed to plunge down roots and surge forth the moment we planted them. Surely the wild magenta rugosas behind our house thrived there, the low branches sheltering the serpent. Maybe a new apple is in order on our land. Since ours are gnarly, they tempt no one.
From much-later historical inventories of gardens, I'm intrigued by black bryony—whatever that may be. It sounds like something entwined over the graves of Catherine and Heathcliff. One writer of the time recommends carnations every three and a half feet, the intervals planted with marjoram, lily of the valley, ranunculus, and cat thyme. Thyme and marjoram would add texture and cover bare dirt. “What about zinnias,” Ed says. “Old plain zinnias. What do you have in store for me in that yellow book of yours?”
“O.K., I'll skip the plants. We've got a pergola to build. I'd love at least one statue. And a fountain.”
“Is that all? What about a folly? I like the idea of those ornamental hermits you read about, too. And we could build a fake ruin at the end of the Lake Walk. A broken arch, a piece of a door, a tumbled wall.”
“That's a great idea! A place to sit. . . .”
He looks stunned. “No wait, back up. I was kidding. You're not serious, are you?”
Spring Kitchen
ANTIPASTI ——
Paolo's Fennel Fritters
Anything Paul Bertolli cooks I will eat. Once he even served me tendons. “Whose tendons are these, anyway?” I asked. He flinched only a little. “Veal. You'll like them.” He knows I'm somewhat squeamish and tries to educate me. When he was chef at Chez Panisse, I was allowed to assist him in the kitchen a few times. My first assigned task was to behead a mound of pigeons. Their closed blue eyelids b
othered me, but not wanting to be just the lettuce washer, I began to whack their little heads off. Paul has Italian parents and deep affinities with Italian life. His genius is for revealing the essence of whatever he's cooking. His pleasure and integrity are clear to anyone who reads and cooks from his Chez Panisse Cooking. Recently he has built an acetaia, a barn for the complex process of making balsamic vinegar. He was one of our first guests here and helped us set up our prototype kitchen. When I'm in California, I love to go to his restaurant, Oliveto's in Oakland, especially on nights when he celebrates truffles or porcini mushrooms. This is his recipe, just as he handed it to me, for fennel fritters. Select young fennel—older plants are too fibrous.
6.5 ounces of wild fennel hearts, cleaned
6.5 ounces of tender fronds and leaves
1 whole head of garlic, peeled
23/4 cups of sturdy bread crumbs from a day-old loaf
3/4 cup of freshly grated parmigiano reggiano
1 whole egg
Bella Tuscany Page 13