The Journal of a Gardener in Tuscany
May 13th 2004
With less than a month to go before our first wedding we are making sure every job that needs doing will be done in time. A month can go quickly in gardening, especially with all the other work to do.
I have arranged for a helicopter to come and take photos of La Doccia on the morning of the first wedding when the house and garden should be looking its finest. This means no strimming on the slopes around the house; though they may harbour snakes being bitten by an adder is a small price to pay to have green looking slopes on all the photos. Usually the helicopter takes pictures in July when the grass is brown, but here we will have soft lush lawns and slopes full of wildflowers.
Naturally the day after the helicopter comes we’ll all be out strimming furiously to make the place safe once more. The slopes will turn brown, die back and look awful, but the postcards we’ll make from our photos will show an immaculate green corner of Tuscany for ever, and will sell the place better.
Now the lawnmower is back the lawn is beginning to shape up. It became too painful to watch as the missing spare part for the lawnmower never seemed to come from Milan to our Mechanic. The lawn grew and grew, soon it became a meadow, then a prairie and by the time the lawnmower came back the lawn was anything but a lawn. As I parked my car and scampered down to the office on Monday morning, all excited at the prospect of taming the lawn, I was horrified to see Antonio strimming, yes strimming, his way through the heart of the beautiful lawn. I managed, just, not to hyperventilate before I stopped him and pointed desperately to some olive trees to prune, which he obediently did, and I was left with half a lawn overgrown, to 12’’ height, and the other half strimmed to the ground.
This is a tricky one, a two toned lawn, and after mowing it twice in 4 days it still looks intriguing. Luckily the cool damp weather, which usually ends at the end of April, has continued and the lawn continues to grow without the relentless sun beating back growth. I top dressed and fertilised the lawn with a sandy mix high in Nitrogen. I know one should top dress in the autumn but better late than never. Top dressing with sand helps the lawn to level itself out, over a period of time, and give it a flat look. Most people in England buy a house and inherit a lawn that may be been worked on for a century or more, every week, without a break, except perhaps the odd war. Not here in the mountains though, I suspect that less than twenty years ago this lawn was ploughed, farmed and harvested to produce something more useful than the grass cuttings I manage to make.
The roses look set to produce all the confetti our wedding guests will need. But the weather has been so bad that we moved the lemon tree onto the terrace and moved a number of plants back under cover. Last Friday we had over an inch of hail fall here while it snowed at nearby Consuma, the Hostas in particular were not happy at the hail. This is weather that is simply unheard of in Tuscany. Elsewhere I have started to identify some of the orchids growing here, we have Orchis Tridentata and Orchis Purpurea in abundance, but the smallest of the orchids here is the most intriguing. It seems to have three different types of flowers growing on the one stem. I expect it is extremely rare, probably unique to this valley in fact, so much so that I am tempted to ‘discover’ it, and name it after myself…
May 4th 2004
We are almost adopting a laid back attitude to the garden this week, so much is growing and flowering it is hard enough just to take in what is happening let alone doing more work, so sitting back and watching what is happening and enjoying it too is definitely a sensible course of action.
The roses are shooting up and looking very promising, these occupy the main flowerbeds and we have a number of large climbing roses growing up walls and covering the Lavenderia. These were planted three years ago, last year they were fully settled and this year they are all very leafy with lots of flower buds waiting to open over the summer. The herbaceous border, built last year, is also a riot of colour and looking very healthy, the tulips are in full flow and, to make a mess of out the terraces, the walnut trees around the house are flowering and shedding thick conical catkins all over the terraces and staircases.
We have not had to water the garden or even the pots once, a rarity by this time in the year, and we have had steady showers, along with sun, all week long. Ideal for the garden but a pity for people visiting La Doccia and hoping for some fair weather. They seem to be enjoying the food and wine though and so I am thinking of growing a few vines here soon to make a little wine, and if that is no good, some grapes for them to eat.
The lemon tree looks resplendent, with about 12 lemons growing and a number more on the way. An olive tree will fit the pot we planned to put the lemon in though. It is too late to replant a lemon tree and so we will wait until September before doing anything. This means we are stuck with a bounteous flowering lemon tree crammed into an ugly black plastic container, with handles, straight from the garden centre. The short term plan is to buy an even larger terracotta pot and put the tree and the pot, all together, into it and put the young olive tree into the smaller pot ready originally the lemon. Both will look good in the car park alongside the geraniums already flowering.
The lawn is now about 8 inches high and is unlikely to be cut until the weekend, when the machine is back and, conveniently, when I am in London. In the 18 days since the lawn was last mowed the lawn has grown, in some parts, over 12 inches, and following a day of incessant rain today, these perfect grass growing conditions continue. All I need now is a herd of sheep to move around the farm and wolf up the thick green grass everywhere.
Talking of walking the land, the olive groves are thick with flowers, Star of Jerusalem (Ornithogalum Umbellatum), White Campion (Silene Alba), Sun Spurge (Euphorbia Helioscopia), all abound and are some I have identified. But none impress, or stand out so distinctly, as the orchids in the olive grove by the Traversaia stream. These are not mere meadow flowers, but instead stand upright and regal, as if the olive trees are there simply to complement their beauty. There are a number of different orchids here, and I am still identifying them, but of all the flowers that grow here, these are the most striking, and unlike the flowers above, seem too well crafted be meadow flowers.
These are just a fraction of what there is, everyday I take new photos of unfamiliar flowers in their natural environment. Luckily there are no stinging nettles like there are in England. When a child I was told Roman soldiers bought stinging nettle seeds over to England in their boots, if that is the case, they brought all their seeds over with them and left none in this part of Tuscany.
Rupert Mayhew recently moved to Tuscany, Italy, from a career in IT in London. He works in and runs an expanding agriturismo and this new role includes the task of creating a garden out of what is now mountainside.
http://www.ladocciawelcomes.com.
rmayhew@ladocciawelcomes.com
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