The island gardens which dot the Italian lakes are among the most beautiful and beguiling in the world. But it takes a gardener to explain their fascination
I checked into the hotel on the shore of Lake Maggiore very late after a long and complicated journey from Padua, and as I went down to breakfast I was quickly jolted out of familiarity. Not only was everyone speaking German but the Italian waitresses were marshalling and regimenting them ? and me ? into seating plans and queues with a Teutonic, seemingly entirely un-Italian brusqueness.
This was something of a culture shock. But north of Milan and Verona, Italy morphs into a transalpine country and, once you pass the great fertile plain of Lombardy and Piedmont, the Alps define this part of Europe beyond any linguistic or national boundaries. It can make for a dislocating experience.
I first went to Como by train from Milan on a Sunday afternoon and it was packed, not with tourists from the north but trippers from the city going to see friends and stroll on the lake front before heading home. Its connection to Milan is long-standing. Como still makes the best silk in Italy and has always attracted the fashion and textile moguls. Hence the establishment of villas such as Carlotta, where the Clerici family, who made their fortune in textiles in the 17th century, created a large garden, and why 200 years later Gianni Versace bought the beautiful Villa Fontanelle.
The villas of the rich and famous line the edge of the lake like a geological stratum of wealth. But a boat ride down to Menaggio with the mountains rising sheer from the water, Switzerland over the ridge to your left and seemingly virgin woods to your right growing out of impossible slopes, and you can appreciate the dramatic beauty of the place for the cost of the ride. You can also peer into these finely primped gardens as you pass. And if you go into the square in Menaggio and eat risotto made from perch caught that morning in the lake, you will get as close as you might ever do to the essence of the place.
One of the marks of a really special garden is its uniqueness. There are a thousand gardens conforming to every trope of good taste and style, filled with interesting and beautifully tended plants and managed with skill and care. But they all slip through the space created by the first of its type. The very best gardens break moulds and challenge preconceptions. They are quirky and sometimes odd and awkward, but always expand you as a person. The garden at Villa Balbianello is a member of this awkward squad.
I was entranced by Balbianello. It is so obsessive; an aspect of horticulture is taken to an extreme. Although not all of it is beautiful to my eyes, much is ? and in its setting, perched on a promontory jutting into Lake Como, it is wildly impressive and in as dramatic a position as any garden might be. The garden is the last piece of a wooded isthmus, forming a steep hillock surrounded by water on three sides, of which perhaps 30 acres is unspoilt, protected wood and just an acre or two garden. To get to it from the road (rather than via the water steps with their Venetian, striped landing posts), you go down a drive at least half a mile long in the woods, edged all the way with a box hedge. This gives it immediate mystique in this part of the world filled with villas of the rich and famous. You are entering into a secret.
It was first occupied and built on in the 13th century by Franciscan monks as a monastery and hospital and remained in the church until 1787 when it was bought by Cardinal Angelo Durini. He owned the neighbouring Villa Balbiano, but bought the promontory to enlarge his estate ? hence the diminutive name, Balbianello ? and the 18th-century buildings are largely as he left them. He inherited the twin bell towers, oratory and convent on the water's edge and added a portico on top of the hill, flanked by two rooms which serve as a library and a music room.
In the 19th century Balbianello was owned by the Visconti family and was the centre of strong nationalist feeling during the period of Austrian rule of Italy. An Arbutus menziesii was planted at the entrance to prominently display its simultaneous combination of green leaves, white flowers and red berries ? the Italian national colours.
The key to the garden is the juxtaposition of this restraint against such a wild, untrammelled position. Where the gardened area ends, cliffs, rocks, scrub and wild wood begin. There is no transition. This contrast is made more extreme by the absolute control that extends literally to the last leaf. The Ficus pumila that is trained into swags and snaking arabesques around the pillars of the loggia connecting the library and music room is ? so I was told ? cut with scissors. The only other place that I have seen this taken to similar lengths is in the temple gardens in Kyoto, but they are not set against this astonishing backdrop.
Of course there is a sense that this kind of manicurist approach to horticulture is going to absurd lengths, but that is the point. Were it set in suburbia it would be buttock-clenchingly restricted. But surrounded by a wild, craggy landscape of rock, water, trees and alpine air it soars into art. In 1988 the garden was left to the FAI (Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano), the Italian equivalent of the National Trust.
You put this garden on you like a coat. Everything in it faces outwards to the water. As you enter it you become part of that external display ? and in my case, a particularly unpruned, scruffy part, too. The entire garden is paraded for the benefit of passing water traffic and yet remains completely hidden from anywhere else on land. It is like an island with a connecting tunnel through the woods. The strange thing is that this does not feel like exposure. Despite its prominence to all passing boats, the garden feels secluded, a sanctuary.
There is no flat. All the curves and sweeps of the ground, grass, paths and clipped mounds of azaleas, and great moulded sleeves of bay all swoop down to the water. As a hands-on gardener I am staggered by the sheer physical feat of keeping this all cut in such awkward, inaccessible places. I visited as the sun was slipping down behind the mountains so the light bounced off the water, and Lake Como's curtain of mountains was made into a jagged, smoky blue silhouette between blue water and blue sky.
The village of Stresa has become a series of over-elaborate hotels strung along the road by Lake Maggiore, all looking out on to the Borromeo islands, of which Isola Bella is the dearest and clearest. From the lakeside it is a floating wedding cake, tiered into layers with statues and columns like candles. As the boat brings you closer, it reveals itself to be a Disney set wreathed in pink roses, or a huge cruise ship anchored offshore. Count Carlo Borromeo, who was governor of the Lake Maggiore region and inherited the islands, commissioned the garden in 1632 to turn the rocky island that he renamed after his wife, Isabella d'Adda, into a galleon moored on the lake. It took 40 years to complete, bringing all the soil from the mainland.
The tourist reaches the garden only after visiting the Borromeo palace, where Napoleon slept and the Borromeos lived and entertained in the grandest of styles. This is a baroque garden, as overblown and trumpeting as any other on this earth, and the stairs lead up and through the looking glass into a garden that has all the logic and strange rhythms of a dream. You pass through huge wrought iron gates and out into a grassy piazza before the vast and completely, absurdly, operatic shell-shaped water theatre. It is like the west front of a cathedral dedicated to a shriekingly theatrical saint, crowded with statues, putti and enormous scallops and surmounted by the largest statue of all, a figure astride a unicorn ? the symbol of Borromeo power and glory.
The statues are colossal, showing their best face to the passing outside world. Borromeo's unicorn, ridden by a winged figure, leaps out towards the northern Alps tethered only by the bulk of his enormous testicles. This is opera teetering into pantomime. The 10 terraces that stack up like an Aztec pyramid to make the platform are now planted in roses, hydrangeas, cut flowers, hideous bedding plants and espaliered citrus. Each narrow tier is filled with one predominant plant so that on the south face in particular they look like the shelves of a florist, but when they were made citrus would have dominated. The climate is exceptionally mild, with the lake acting as an insulator, and citrus is still grown all year round.
Best of all is the area on the east side, beneath the large aviary, filled still with lovebirds, which has massive clipped hedges of holm oak, camellia, bay, yew, box and holly. Seen from the water as you come from Isola Madre, it hides all the flamboyant campness of the rest of the garden and presents blocks of green above the water that is not in the least bit solemn but utterly, exhilaratingly serious.
But this corner of good taste is an aberration. It is the secret depths of Isola Bella while its true public face screams across the lake, a tipsy drag queen of a garden ready to party all night and the next day, too. You leave exhausted and smiling.
Essentials
This is an edited extract from Great Gardens of Italy by Monty Don and Derry Moore, published by Quadrille, �25, out now. Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies from London to Milan Linate from �35.99 one way
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/mar/20/monty-don-gardens-italian-lakes
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