The 800-year-old estate of a Sicilian marquis with evolving displays of succulents and tropical flowers
When a house shares a name with its inhabitants, you can be sure they have lived there a long time. Take San Giuliano in Sicily, the rose-coloured home of Marquis Giuseppe Paternò Castello di San Giuliano, which was built in the fifteenth century on land that has belonged to his family for over 800 years. It is hard to believe San Giuliano had no garden when the marquis inherited it in 1976. Today, it is one of Sicily’s most exciting gardens, for although mature trees and plants convey a sense of permanence, it is regularly reinvigorated with new ideas and planting schemes.
The marquis and his late wife Fiamma Ferragamo (best known as principal designer of the Ferragamo shoe label) spent 25 years creating the garden. Although it has continued to develop, its structure remains largely unchanged. There is a terrace in front of the house, a collection of ornamental trees, a swimming pool and a cactus bed by the front gate. In the Nineties, the couple commissioned landscape architect Oliva di Collobiano to transform a walled orchard and vegetable plot into a lower garden known as the giardinetto. The entire site covers seven acres.
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Heavily armed cacti and succulents make an appropriate welcoming committee at the gate, for the house was originally a masseria, or semi-fortified farmhouse. A first glance across the lawn reveals at least eight different species of palms, as well as Norfolk Island pines, Australian grass trees (Xanthorrhoea australis) with charred black trunks and a massive cedar. Explore a little and you might find dragon trees, Nepalese bamboo, a special collection of African encephalartos, aromatic California pepper trees and many other treasures. Beyond the upper garden, orange groves spread like a green sea towards Mount Etna.
Ever since she became head gardener in 2002, Rachel Lamb has worked closely with the marquis. He is always excited to discover new plants, so she regularly rethinks planting schemes throughout the garden. Some recent innovations have been in the giardinetto, which she works hard to fill with heady perfumes and rich colours in all seasons. Despite ferocious winter winds and searing summer heat, Mediterranean plants thrive there, and thanks to a system of raised stone water tanks and irrigation channels, she can grow subtropical and tropical plants as well.
Tropical water plants were among Rachel’s new introductions last year, when she found that Victoria cruziana, a South American water lily with huge pads and dramatic white flowers, would enjoy life in the largest of the giardinetto’s water tanks. Equally happy in the smaller tank is blue-flowered Nymphaea ‘King of Siam’, another novelty in this entertaining part of the garden.
Last year, Rachel also began to make ‘a very timid trial’ of Caladium bicolor ‘Angel Wings’, or elephant ears, in damper, shadier areas of the giardinetto. She experimented with red and green leaves in part of the tropical garden known as the ‘equatorial’ area, with white-and-green-leaved caladium under the pergola that divides the giardinetto in two. According to Rachel, these were a hit with the marquis: ‘He liked their white and marble-green elephant ears so much he wanted carpets of them.’
The house at San Giuliano is either rented out or filled with family and friends throughout the year. The marquis likes to have flowers in every room, and producing blooms to cut all year round is one of the challenges of Rachel’s job. This year, she has upped the stocks of allium, narcissi, Dutch iris and tulip bulbs in various parts of the garden, as well as adding more roses and asters to ensure a steady supply. The marquis’s mother used to grow dahlias in the vegetable garden and now Rachel is staging their return with ‘a collection of big, bright, dinner-plate varieties’.
She believes that any garden becomes ‘stodgy’ if left too long to its own devices. Take the cactus garden at the entrance to San Giuliano, which was first planted in the Seventies. It has always been a haunting and sculptural combination of agaves and aloes, thrusting spires of cereus cacti, yuccas, cycads and prickly pear. However, as time passed, larger specimens had begun to screen smaller ones, and everything overlapped so that the plants’ wonderful architectural shapes were lost and it was almost impossible to get in among them.
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It takes bravery, expertise and brute strength to work with mature cacti, and when you consider the prickliness of the prickly pear and the spines on the agaves, it is no surprise that the plants had been left to do as they pleased. But last year Rachel called in a team from Vivai Cuba, near Syracuse, one of Italy’s most important cactus nurseries, to strip everything out and replant the finest specimens. ‘They came with all the necessary courage,’ she says. Now Rachel talks of the cactus bed as an ongoing performance. ‘We reinstated the main protagonists and added more layers to the drama by making the bed deeper and using the buttressed wall of the chapel as a backdrop,’ she says. The result resembles a complex play unfolding.
The marquis might easily have abandoned the garden after the loss of his wife in 1998. Instead, he employed Rachel to take it forward and as a result of their cooperation, San Giuliano’s garden continues to be beautiful, entertaining and vividly alive.
Marchesi di San Giuliano: marchesidisangiuliano.it
Marianne Majerus1/9The cacti stand guard in front of the family chapel.
Marianne Majerus2/9A stone irrigation channel runs along the edge of a swathe of heat-loving aromatic plants in the giardinetto.
Marianne Majerus3/9Rosa gigantea clambers up an agricultural silo that dates back to the Thirties.
Marianne Majerus4/9The path through the giardinetto was tiled in an intricate pattern by artisans from northern Italy.
Marianne Majerus5/9Raised stone tanks are part of the traditional irrigation system in the giardinetto.
Marianne Majerus6/9The ornamental fountain is attributed to Baroque architect Giovanni Battista Vaccarini.
Marianne Majerus7/9A larger water tank in the giardinetto.
Marianne Majerus8/9A view from the garden over the orange groves to Mount Etna.
Marianne Majerus9/9The cactus garden was first planted in the Seventies. A recent renovation by a team of specialists has highlighted the dramatic shapes of the various cacti and succulents, which include yuccas, euphorbias, aeoniums and cereus.
