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Here at Marittima, in the state of Puglia, southern Italy, we’re about as far east as you can go in the country, close to the sea and only 20 minutes by car from Santa Maria di Leuca. Leuca is best known for being the place where you can see the sun rise and set across the ocean. Years ago it was a fashionable tourist resort, and it is now recovering that status. The drive from Marittima is not unlike the one 65 years ago from Beaulieu in the south of France to Cannes, with the occasional house, high cliffs and the beginnings of a tourist industry.
The landscape here is wild and natural, with cacti and tall grasses, all dominated by olive trees of great age and strange shapes, interspersed with lemon and orange trees. Outbreaks of rock are frequent, and you can find wild irises and orchids. Asphodels, the white wild variety, mass across the landscape, soon replaced by great smudges of red poppies. Occasionally the red is interspersed with the purple of opium poppies. Wild sage and rosemary abound; walk on the ground and your every footstep will release the scent of thyme.
It was this landscape that would shape the garden at our convento, which, when I bought it 15 years or so ago, had not been inhabited by monks since the beginning of the 20th century. The buildings had been used as a tobacco factory and later a store for a scrap merchant’s junk. The gardens did not exist: no walls, no paths, no trace of domestic gardening, nor indeed of any monastic cultivation either. Only broken cars, lorries and tractors grew here. Buying property in southern Italy is not easy; the gardens as they exist today were constructed from land owned by several different people. With the convento buildings came a narrow strip just large enough to house a swimming pool and small areas of planting; we bought the other three acres piece by piece. At the time of writing, one particular section at the edge of the garden belongs to 29 different owners, and every time one of them dies that number multiplies. Buying land for a garden is not an easy business. Planning one, by comparison, seemed simplicity itself: all that’s needed is time, patience and great resolve, for this is a harsh and difficult climate.
In the herb garden, for instance, I planted over 70 varieties of mint, to find that only about half a dozen prospered. Bulbs that do not appear seem to outnumber those that do. Trees die from sudden gusts of weed killer sprayed liberally on surrounding land. The system is to plant and plant again until the garden flourishes.
Gardening at its best is like painting: just as you take a bare canvas, clean and prepare it, the garden is made ready by digging and then sowing wild lupins, which both clean and fertilise the land. Then you sketch out the different areas of the canvas, working in a grid to give it symmetry. This was done at the convento by planting olive trees in a pattern, then hard landscaping of paths, walls, water works and decorative garden buildings. Finally the plants, layering textures and colours.
The gardener has to become painter, sculptor, explorer and collector. Endless travel is involved in a garden like the one here: the searching-out of plants from obscure nurseries, or the finding of a garden that has a plant you always wanted – in my case palma violets and water hibiscus, a plant that grows out of the water to a height of four feet, its flower the size of a soup plate, its large Rajasthan-pink petals as tender as the finest Meissen porcelain. Found as a root among other water plants, this did not look at all special, but come the summer I had a minor miracle in my garden. The hand of Buddha sounds about as mysterious as any plant could be; it is in fact a lemon plant that grows in the shape of a life-size human hand, a great rarity from 17th-century Italy, found in a local nursery.
The stylosa irises, originally from Algeria, yield flowers in shades of blue, one in white and the very rare pink variety that is rumoured to be in Britain. Yet after 20 years of looking I have not yet found this plant. Happier is the clivia, a native of Natal in South Africa: we have nearly 20 varieties growing at the convento in different shades of orange or pink. It is named after a 19th-century Duchess of Northumberland whose maiden name was Clive. We also have in the garden cacti from Africa; greentops, as the cycads local to Western Australia are called; palms from Australia; boab trees from Mexico; plants from the Andes.
Hunting for plants is by far the most exciting form of collecting I have come across in my lifetime. The exhilaration of tracking down a much wanted specimen is intense, far more thrilling for me than discovering a rare object hidden in a market. I also much prefer building gardens to putting together old buildings; it is the often unpredictable cycle of growth that controls your work. Wondering ‘will this plant prosper?’; the sheer excitement when a plant self-seeds; the constant battle against weeds; the weather (too hot or too cold; draught or floods). I am constantly alert as to what might happen, or indeed what has not happened when it should have. A garden is a living thing and is never finished; the collection is never complete.
The challenge of growing plants in the wrong climate really excites the gardener – cymbidium orchids, for instance, grow and flower here with great regularity. Though carefully planned, the garden has developed a life of its own. After 11 years it is becoming a garden of extraction – if there’s too much of one plant, some of it must go. Of course, room for a new plant can always be found. Pots are the thing, small pots, large pots, gigantic pots; everywhere you can put a pot a pot is put. Fifty varieties of daylilies, 300 different succulents and cacti, all live and thrive in pots. Discovered only a mile or two from the convento, these vessels are made by potters working in a field.
The workmen who built the garden live a mile or two away; they moved the earth by hand, and manhandled the large rocks into position. Disused olive-oil tanks carved from solid limestone come in all sizes, from very large to sink-sized; here I have used them to build a water garden with different varieties of plants.
When we started this garden there was no great enthusiasm for growing flowers privately in Puglia. As a result, many species came from Rassells in Earls Court Road, and Woottens of Wenhaston has supplied a large quantity of the rarer plants, the roses coming from David Austin. The local nursery, which has helped with rare plants and trees, including the beautiful weeping pine from Kasmir, was Tarantino at Cavallino.
The truth about gardening is that we all benefit from the great volume of collectors, horticulturists and those who own historic gardens: these people, seldom mentioned and often unthanked for their legacy, are the sources that we draw upon when we build a new garden.
Convento di Santa Maria di Costantinopoli, Via Convento, 73030 Marittima LE, Italy. Details: ilconventopuglia.com
A version of this appeared in the February 2014 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
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