The Stibbert garden

This Florence garden is a bit rundown. But, although it does not seem to have much of a maintenance budget, it is very attractive. The rundown look actually emphasizes its rather romantic appearance.

Frederick Stibbert (1838-1906) had an English father and a rich Italian mother. He was a great collector and made this garden just outside Florence with the help of Giuseppe Poggi.

Giardino dell'ortocolturale

Despite the name, for most of the year this is more of a park where you can take your dog for a run than a horticultural garden. The busy season is apparently spring when the garden takes on a new dimension.  At all times of the year, it is still rather elegant and offers some interesting features.

 

Giardino della Gherardesca

Covering 4.5 hectares, this garden is one of the largest private gardens of Florence. Being private, it is not open to the public. Actually it is now part of the Four Seasons, a five star hotel. Still, we wrote to the hotel explaining that we knew the garden was not open to the public, but asked if they could make an exception. Their answer was that we were right, it was not open to the  public. However, if we could set a date, they would give us a time when we would be welcome!

The Boboli and the need to control

The Boboli Garden, probably the best known garden in Florence, reminds us that our tendency to associate  gardens with flowers is a relatively new. Before the nineteenth century, gardening was mostly about putting order in nature, according to classical notions of the ideal landscape. For us nature is at its best when left alone; for them it was at its best when completely under control.  It is an approach that does produce beautiful spaces as shown in the Boboli  but, in the end, our need for total control of nature might be our downfall.

Terracotta pots

What is more quintessential to the Italian garden than the terracotta pot? The problem with terracotta is, of course, that a solid frost will break the pot. Dropping it will have the same effect. What I found particularly interesting in the Giardino dei simplici was to see how these pots are maintained and repaired.

Il Giardino dei Simplici

Recently, we visited the Botanical Garden in  Florence, Italy - il giardino dei simplici. The simplici, simples in English (or in French for that matter), are the medicinal plants that were considered effective on their own. They do not have to be mixed with others to form a compound. The use of that name for the garden and the reference to medicinal plants suggest how old this garden is. In fact it was established on December 1st, 1545.

Nowadays there is still a large section given over to medicinal and culinary plants, but ornamental plants are also prominent. There were not many blooms at this time of the year. The most noticeable were some paperwhite daffodils (Narcissus papyraceus), the kind we force indoors, but which here have naturalized in the garden.

Gloriosa Daisy

I suppose the name Gloriosa Daisy might make a botanist cringe but, for the gardener, it is a handy designation. These are not daisies, but Rudbeckia that have been hybridized and have finally settled into a big yellow/orange daisy, about two feet tall (60 cm) and biennial. Its flowers, however, are quite unpredictable, and there is a great deal of diversity, both in the colour and the markings on the flowers.

Annual poppies - 2015

Every summer we grow various annual poppies. Some of the seeds are bought, but mostly they are collected in the garden the previous summer. As the plants hybridize on their own, the flowers we end up with can be quite different from year to year. Some can be absent one year and reappear the next. This was the case this year for Papaver somniferum var. paeoniiflorum which came up everywhere while we had few of them last year.

Pots on the move

It is self evident that an important advantage of growing plants in pots is that they can be moved around. In every garden, there are spots which, at  least part of the time, are drab, if not boring. Pots are very useful to deal with such spots. Moving them to various places allows you not only to brighten a dull corner, but also to see your own garden in a completely different light.

Eyes bigger than stomach

I was walking by the pond when I noticed that a goldfish had died and was floating among the water plants. I bent down to pick it up with the intentiion of putting it on the compost heap but, as I got closer, the dead fish quickly sank back down into the water!