How to create an Italian Garden
without moving your garden to Italy
There’s something deeply satisfying about Italian gardens.
A style of garden design that has strutted far beyond the thigh-high boot of Italy, you’d know if you were in one if you spotted some or all of the following: neatly trimmed box hedges, water features, statues (think Ancient Roman figures, not gnomes fishing for gravel) and an abundance of greenery. Everything placed with an accountant’s flair – in balanced order along geometric lines.
Our eyes like symmetry (and relax at the sight of colour green) which is why being in an Italian garden is as comforting and transcendent as the first bite of a piping hot pizza slice.
And the gardens were designed to be that way.
Many of the original showpiece Italian gardens you can visit today (in Italy) sprung up between 1550 and 1650 all thanks to cardinals caught up in a papal pissing contest.
Vying to become Pope, who had the god-given right to collect taxes and exert dominion over much of Europe at the time, the cardinals had plenty of money for marble paving slabs and a BLT meal deal at the garden centre. This merry red-cloaked band of men needed to impress with the drama of their gardens and signal stature with statues and their suitability for the papacy with fountains. “Look how far the water shoots into the sky,” they’d bellow with pride, imagining their own ascension to the heavens (raking in cash on the way).
It’s no different to how we judge people on their front gardens and draw conclusions about their lives and character. I have two bins I’ve forgotten to bring in, a topiary statue of Sporty Spice doing a high-kick and a stone bird bath with a miniature Oprah Winfrey figurine on the edge preaching to the birds. Go on. Judge me.
And their style? Well, cardinals like order. The kind of blokes who always have their scriptures perpendicular to the edge of their desks. But this was a period of unsettling chaos across Italy with wars and challenges to the papal reign. It’s only natural that they tried to get a handle on their anxiety by exerting power over what they could control: their box hedges.
Without Monty Don, where did they get their #gardeninspo?
Many of these gardens were created during (and post) the Italian Renaissance which spanned the 1400s and 1500s. It was the era that took Europe out of the Middle Ages and a time of rediscovery of the forgotten social, cultural and scientific advances the Ancient Romans and Greeks had made. Importantly, in those reclaimed treasures was a form of Latin that helped people better express ideas, engage in persuasive debate and explore what it meant to be human. It would be a bit like us rediscovering the Collins dictionary after becoming reliant on a vernacular solely made up of emojis. “Sad face.”
The Italian Renaissance was also the first self-aware era in history (in that they wrote about entering a new period) and people themselves became more self-aware. They were still religious, but there was an interest in humanist philosophy as they became concerned with civic duty and the moral code of ‘the ideal man’ away from religious teachings. An ‘ideal woman’ was seemingly still pretty mute.
In pockets of Italy like Florence and Venice, commerce boomed, republics and banks formed and secular life developed. Ordinary people could take up more educated professions and become lawyers and accountants (now in demand thanks to the need for contracts and P&L sheets) and manoeuvre up the social rankings. People believed they were special and wanted more from life. And in a self-fulfilling prophecy, they created a new vision of the world.
Dukes, princes and ballers financially supported artists and thinkers through Patreon (or patronage as it was then known) and the conditions were ripe for art, architecture, culture, politics, philosophy, humanities, science and mathematics to flourish – and all these disciplines show up in Italian gardens.
Mathematics was revered and it was believed that God created the world along numerical lines so paths and hedges were arranged in strict geometric patterns. Water features and fountains were a display of extraordinary physics and mechanics in the absence of electric pumps from Homebase. Statues were a homage to the Ancient Roman and Greek classical worlds. Symbolism embedded in the garden design would tell myths and in the case of the cardinals, their right to the papal throne. “Why, of course I should be Pope! It’s written in the mosaics.”
Collections of exotic plants and bizarre (from ‘bizzarro’ in Italian) fruit trees – like fingered lemons – impressed visitors and the gardens became living botanical museums. People wrongly assume that Italian gardens are all hedge and no flower (mi scusi) because when people later travelled to Italy from the 17th Century onwards and started recreating Italian gardens elsewhere, many flowers in the original gardens had perished alongside the bins they hadn’t brought in.
The creators of these Italian Renaissance gardens sought to replicate the architecture of Roman Emperor Hadrian’s gardens to awe guests with a sense of scale, lighting and theatre. And they weren’t averse to whimsy, often including the occasional surprise comedic touch whether that’s a trick water fountain or a grotesque gaping-mouth sculpture you could dine in so you could eat and feel as though you’re being eaten. Perhaps gravel-trawling gnomes and Oprah bird baths do have a place.
So, to recap: Hedges. Statues. Fountains. Symmetry. Awe. Magic. Wonky Lemons.
That’s how you create an Italian garden without moving your garden to Italy. Campari poured. Cypress trees on order.
Homework Club
If you want to stroll a little further down the formal garden path…
The Land Where the Lemons Grow by Helena Atlee – A rich and unexpected history of Italy through its citrus fruit, and in the hands of a superbly talented writer. I loved it and now savour lemons with a reverent appreciation. Buy it.
Italian Gardens by Helena Atlee – An amble through Italy’s best gardens with a sharp-eyed, knowledgable and sensitive guide. In lieu of a tour with Helena herself (which is on my bucket list), this is the next best thing. It looks as though it’s out of print but keep an eye out on World of Books for a copy – there’s two left. And check her website for courses and events.
Italian Villas and their Gardens by Edith Wharton – A critical classic by another writer who hopped from fiction to garden writing and back (like Helena), Edith Wharton explores the principles behind ‘Italian garden-magic’ and the varying success of villas across Italy in capturing it. She doesn’t hold back her punches. Again, look out on World of Books.
Edith Wharton’s Italian Gardens by Vivian Russell – Following in Wharton’s footsteps (and other influential figures like Dickens and Byron), Vivian Russell sets off on her own journey to photograph the gardens. Along with stunning photos, she weaves in more historical and literary context to Edith’s work and is a worthy compendium – bordering on must-have if I could persuade you to pick two books. Out of print but on World of Books.
Monty Don’s Italian Gardens TV Series – If you still have a DVD player that a child hasn’t jammed two irretrievable DVDs into, then congratulate yourself (you’re one up on me) and consider this series. It’s dreamy.