You have bought the Italian hideaway of your dreams: it clings to a hillside in Umbria or Tuscany, the view from every window a picture of sublime oak woods or swelling rows of vines. The builders have finished at last and left you in peace. Now it is time to let your affections loose on the garden. But with what should you plant it up? Let’s be methodical about this: draw a Venn diagram. In one circle go those plants that can last through four months of searing summer drought; in another, species hardy enough to survive eight weeks or more of frozen ground. For good measure, draw a circle containing some gems with root systems so convoluted that they will hold up your terraces without costly wall-building, which — if it involves mortar of any kind — may put you on a direct collision course with the planning department of your local council; then, to round it off, a circle that takes account of soil types — alkaline and rocky in much of Umbria, heavy clay in Tuscany’s rolling hills.
Have a look at what is left in the overlap at the centre of the diagram. Unfortunately, not much. There are those plants you will find growing spontaneously in fields and woods around you: tough gorse, dogwood and elder — though these have the infuriating habit of growing infinitely better wild than when planted. And then there are the aromatics: lavender and cotton lavender, sage, savory and hardy rosemary.
The wonderful Teucrium fruticans, with its olive-green foliage and tiny violet flowers, is a good bet on steep banks, although you may find it dies back in hard winters, only to shoot anew from the base in spring.
All of these plants are lovely, but they are not going to make for a particularly varied outlook. So, before you even visit the local vivaio (nursery), it pays to plan carefully how your little corner of paradise is going to be made to survive.
Extremes of cold are, in the long run, manageable. Don’t make the mistake of thinking, “if it survives in the UK, it will surely survive here”. That guff about the warming effects of the Gulf Stream may not convince you as the wind-chill factor turns Albion into an icebox, but your plants feel it — and they don’t have the benefit of it in central Italy.
So, the higher you are, the hardier your plant choices need to be. This is painfully spot-specific: I couldn’t understand why half of one small rose bed in my Umbrian garden froze to death in last winter’s cold snap, until I realised that the shadow of the house lingered longer down that end. For more than two months the soil never thawed.
However, it is the heat and drought that will cause you real headaches, not to mention expense. There was a time, 15 years ago, when I first rented a house in the Umbrian countryside, when you could rely on a drop of rain now and then through the summer: enough to keep borders limping on and avert the lawn area turning to desert.
Not so nowadays, and watering bans and occasional shutdowns of the water supply are common in many areas of central Italy in summer. In the Umbrian village where I now live, irrigating with mains water means a hefty fine. So a well is a necessity — and an expensive one, especially if you have to dig 280ft into a hillside as I did; then there are surveys and permits to fork out for, the pump in the well, the tank into which to decant well water and the pump to get the water out of the tank and on to your garden.
When the situation gets really dire, my local council refuses to authorise well-digging at all; at that point, it’s a waiting game — no garden until the water table rises again. Unless your idea of a perfect summer is spending hours every evening from June to September moving the sprinkler about, you are going to need an automated watering system. Despite the initial cost, this makes sense from many points of view. You won’t have dead plants on your conscience if you only spend short periods in your Italian home. You can water for briefer times, at night, when plants have hours to revel in their dousing with minimum evaporation.
With such a system, your potential plant palette expands exponentially to embrace any fully hardy species. With a little water, roses, in particular, will grow like weeds. Even a minimum of moisture means tough evergreen shrubs such as berberis, crataegus, phlomis and cotoneaster thrive; but so will many deciduous plants for spring and summer colour and scent — philadelphus and winter jasmine, caryopteris, buddleia and glorious ornamental sages.
Should you be lucky enough to have a patch of woodland or just a clump of trees, a watering system will allow you to create a brilliant undergrowth of periwinkle, hostas, honeysuckle and St John’s wort. With your conditions assessed and the garden dug over and compost added, the next task is to find a nursery that meets your needs. Fortunately, central Italy is blessed with a plethora of these. Not garden centres: nurseries.
As always in Italy, for best results you will need to build up a good working relationship with a local nursery, which will usually be small, and almost always family run. Most will install a watering system for you, and undertake planting and some maintenance; and all, once they know you, will provide invaluable advice on what to plant where.
At one that I use regularly, Signor Bruno refused to sell me the variety of peach that — after lengthy research into hardiness and suitability — I had set my heart on. It flowered a little too early to avoid the last frosts in my garden 1,800ft up the hill, he insisted; I would never get a peach off it.
You may have to overcome some preconceptions on the part of your nurseryman: try explaining, for example, in a country area, that you want that glorious olive tree outside the kitchen window left green and lush, not pared right back into a champion fruit-producing skeleton. They will shake their heads at your stupidity.
But you may also have some preconceptions of your own to face. You won’t be able to recreate your English garden — and indeed, why should you? Lawns are a good example: you will note that only the most Anglophile of your neighbours tries to grow more than a tiny patch. Given the water crisis, a manicured expanse around any home makes me feel that precious natural resources are being squandered. When advising people on a new garden, I always recommend planting and irrigating just enough lawn for everyday enjoyment, leaving everything beyond that to itself.
That British favourite, the wildflower meadow, translates into something rather different here: after the spontaneous May-June explosion of poppies, daisies and viper’s bugloss, and the late-June maturing into waving gold grass heads, your “meadow” may be more burnt-out savannah for much of the rest of the summer season. But just when you would be bracing for the onset of winter in the UK, late-summer rains here bring green blades pushing up through the matted debris, heralding all the euphoria of a second spring.
Smart moves to make
Think ahead: If you decide one soggy spring that wide stone terracing might be nice outside the living room, remember that heat will radiate off it and straight into your house all summer.
Know your bylaws: The more beautiful the location, the more likely it is that your property has a vincolo paesaggistico, ie, zoning regulations, to safeguard the landscape. Don’t even think of building paths, steps or garden structures without planning permission unless you can argue convincingly that they are “temporary” — which basically means no cement.
Know your enemies: Most rural areas of Italy harbour pests that you may not have been banking on: wild boars, for example, or porcupines. The former aren’t keen on getting too near to people, but if left to their own devices will gleefully munch their way through low-hanging bunches of grapes, or scratch up your lawn to get at the bulbs you have planted. Porcupines, too, are partial to bulbs, but any nice, fleshy roots will do them. There’s nothing you can do about this, except keep planting and hope they lose interest.
To contact Anne Hanley, visit www.laverzura.com
