I wrote to Christina, who gardens in Lazio, Italy, and asked her if I could share some of her pictures of her “Formal Garden,” which is so beautiful and simple.
The garden in October. All photos by Christina.
The garden was laid out and planted in 2008. The soil is soft volcanic rock, which is fertile and free-draining. The area usually receives no rain from June through August, and Christina does not irrigate. In the winter, there is “bitingly cold” wind.
The garden in June.
The four identical beds are planted with Perovskia (Russian sage), edged with lavender, and accented with boxwood cubes at the corners. The two beds nearest the house are underplanted with tulip ‘White Dream‘ and allium.
The lavender borders are clipped flat later in the season.
The garden of the Hesperides was where Hercules had to go to find the golden apples, references to it in Italian Renaissace gardens are a symbolic way of comparing the garden to paradise, a way of achieving immortality through hard work. So this garden is, for me, my paradise and certainly the hard work in achieving it will bring its own reward.
Just cut paths through the brush and then beautifully paved them?
Pushed out a few garden rooms with low walls and columns built of local stone?
Mowed the grass only in those small spaces? Gardened (sometimes) with a machete, not hoes and shovels?
A terrace overlooking the wild hillside, the roofs of cabins in the background.
That’s what I kept thinking during our overnight stay at the Virunga Safari Lodge in northern Rwanda a couple of weeks ago.
Path to the local village beyond a wall.
The hotel consists of a main dining/lounge building and eight very private cabins.
The stone terrace and bench of our cabin in morning fog.
A central path through the hotel grounds runs along the top of a hill, and the cabins are sited on both sides on a level below.
The roof of our cabin.
In the brush, wild natives and naturalized exotics grow together in a jumble. They were noisy with birds and insects.
As we took a walk through the neighboring community, I realized that the light-touch landscaping of the hotel grounds created, in a sense, the least artificial environment in the area. Rwanda’s country land is highly cultivated — almost every square foot is part of a vegetable garden or field or wooded plot for timber. A steep slope is rarely an obstacle.
Fields on a nearby hillside.
At the end of a relaxing stay, we had lunch at a table overlooking Lake Burera and its little islands. Then we were off on the 2-hour drive back to Kigali.
It’s sad to leave Eden.
View of sunflowers and the lake from our table at lunch.
To scroll through larger versions of these images (and several more), click ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any thumbnail in the gallery.
To see more photos of Virunga Safari Lodge from a brief visit last year, click here.
Bush- or shade-house at Toowoomba residence, Roslyn, ca. 1900.
I recently came across these photos of an Australian vernacular garden structure: the bush-house.
Fernery at ‘The Hollow,’ Mackay, ca. 1877, by Edmund Rawson.
Bush-houses (also called shade-houses or ferneries) were built to protect tropical plants from the sun. By the late 1800s, many Australian gardeners were as enthusiastic about amassing and displaying these plants as Victorian hothouse collectors in Great Britain and North America.
Florence Reid in a bamboo bush-house at Bainagowan Station, ca. 1900.
The bush-house was modeled on the English glassed-in greenhouse or conservatory, but built with less costly, local materials.
Gardening at the front of Aloe Villa, Toowoomba, ca. 1900. There is a bush-house on the right (and a massive agave on the left).
In a 2003 article for Queensland Review, “Tropicalia: Gardens with Tropical Attitude,” Jeannie Sim wrote that, by the end of the 19th century, a number of international exhibitions in Australia were showing off “high-quality examples of tropicalian gardening” in bush-houses.
Fern-filled conservatory at Bowen Park, Brisbane, ca. 1890, by P.C. Poulsen.Shade-house in the garden at Merthyr House, Brisbane, ca. 1908.
“The most extraordinary of these kinds of structures,” she wrote, “[was] arguably the one built in 1897 for the Queensland Colonial and Indian Exhibition in Brisbane. . . . Covering the walls and pillars of the bush-house were more than 3000 staghorn, bird’s nest and elkhorn ferns collected from the Blackall Range . . . . The exhibition guide [noted that] . . . Queenslanders ‘could gain a more vivid idea than ever before of the unequalled luxuriance of their scrubs.’ These horticultural displays marked both local pride and individuality, and promoted the use of native plants and bush-houses in gardens.”
Bush-house at the Townsville Botanical Gardens, ca. 1900.
According to Sim, many of the plants cared for and protected in the bush-houses were also displayed in popular verandah gardening. “The verandah was the public showcase for the gardener’s bush-house skills.”
Milton residence, Holly Dean on River Road, Milton, ca. 1900. While it’s hard to see any plants, there is an interesting lath structure on the left side of the porch.
Judging from these photos, bush-houses seem to have been frequently constructed of panels of wood or bamboo lath set at decorative angles.
Bush-house at Greenmount Station, ca. 1927.
It also appears that many bush- or shade-houses were used as cool(er) places to entertain and relax.
Fernery in the Clayfield residence, Elderslie, in the Brisbane suburb of Clayfield, ca. 1900.
All of these photos are via the Commons Flickr photostream of the State Library of Queensland, Australia.
Garden of the old prison superintendent house, St. Helena, 1928. There is a small lath summer house in the center of the path and trellis around the perimeter of the home behind it — perhaps enclosing a verandah around interior rooms?
To scroll through larger versions of the pictures, click on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any of the thumbnails in the gallery.
How lovely.
enclos*ure 