Ninfa Garden

No other site could provide the ultimate growing conditions for all its plantings. In less than 90 years it has born gigantic specimens of oaks, copper beeches, magnolias, planes and climbing and shrub roses. But its magic is the medieval ruin that creates the sense that the garden was created in Eden at the birth of all life. Almost 1000 years ago on the road from Rome to Naples stood a thriving village of 2000 inhabitants and 7 churches with 14 towering views over the country (one ruin, the former church of St Blaise, celebrates the saint from which the name Blazey derives).

But disaster struck in 1381 when mercenaries sacked the village and The Black Plague and malaria caused its abandonment. The noble and powerful family of Caetani which was in continuous possession began cleaning up the overgrown thickets to restore the ruins and plant in the English country garden tradition in 1905.

The garden lacks any sense of pretension and in its unsophisticated way it gives hope to all of us that, had we such utopian growing conditions, this is the garden all Australians could create (were it not for the crushing consequences of gardening with infertile soils, 40°C temperatures and unrelenting droughts).

It is the purity of the gushing spring water that unites the garden to its ruins and its loose planting with its rippling waters, invoking the atmosphere of the English village green. For Ninfa's garden unites the original village and its babbling brook with plants that enclose and clasp the ruins with renewed life.

There are no Australian native plants (bar a eucalypt) nor any Australian coastal location that could yield a prodigious stream of water set amongst uplifting volcanic soil, and where is one to find a ruined medieval village to act as support for such exuberant, rambling roses?

The ruins are the ideal host for the extraordinary number of old roses; climbers, ramblers and shrub roses that suit the antiquity of the rubble. But it is curious that it receives such effusive praise from the English garden opinion formers.

It isn't a plantsmen's garden nor does it contain any coherent sense of design, so one has to ask “Why is Ninfa the favourite of the English garden guru Monty Don and garden historian Charles Quest-Ritson?” Charles has just published a lavish book on Ninfa professing that “Ninfa is the most romantic garden in the world”.

Without wishing to dissuade anyone from visiting, some of the plantings are so amateurish that, had the garden been situated in England or even Australia, the critics would have torn it apart.

I suspect that in their praise lies the extreme vanity of the English gardener to raise the looking glass when travelling abroad and only recognise and enjoy the familiarity of home, ignoring the magnificence of Italy's other garden creations.

The garden has been on the list of “must see” gardens for Diggers members for 20 years but this was our third attempt to visit it privately. It is notoriously unfriendly to the private traveller. It is only open on the first and third weekends from April to September and is closed for two hours during lunch. So if you arrive on the wrong day, as we have done twice, the gates remain closed. Because it will only take minimum sized groups of 10 we had to pay €100 for entry but, even so, it leaves unforgettable images.