How to bridge the gap between the intimate world of our interiors and the wildness of nature beyond – how to understand the tension between chaos and order that is at the very heart of things – how much should one intervene? these were our first questions as we began to create a garden at Il Viottolone.
The Tuscan hills around Florence are an open plan arrangement of olive groves, cypresses, vineyards and oak woods with farmhouses, castles, villas and villages dotted in between and thus the ruin that was Il Viottolone in 2005, stood in some hectars of abandoned olive groves, a field and a disused vineyard, all surrounded by cypresses and majestic oak woods.
For many months, we studied our ramshackled new home, in detail we devised plans and elevations for the house alongside plans for the creation of a garden; we spent hours pondering the landscape, the vistas, the movement of the sun, where the shade falls and when and having opened up the inside, we then opened doors onto our outside space.
So often our dreams and desires can get carried away on a wave of excitement and enthusiasm, we forget to heed the telling signs around us of what thrives in the middle of the middle of Italy with scorching hot, dry summers and often freezing cold, harsh winters. New gardens, have little shade and the extreme climate of inland Tuscany is demanding; even with water it is difficult to keep tender new plants alive through the summer months.
However the tough survivors are there, they are in fact all around us, in our gardens, in the olive groves, on the roadside, in the woods, fields, we just have to open our eyes.
To find the harmony we seek in our gardens today, perhaps we need to connect our dreams to our environment, to let them speak together; to join the earth with our dreams by sieving them through together.