A mesmerising Tuscan garden revitalised by Luciano Giubbilei
The starting point for the design of a new garden can take many forms. For designer Luciano Giubbilei, it was the sight of fading sunlight across the trunk of an old evergreen oak and a stone wall one autumn afternoon. ‘In that moment, the feel of the garden became clear to me,’ he says. This epiphany, influenced as much by the architectural as the horticultural, is played out in both the broad strokes and the details of the four-acre private garden in Fabbrica, southern Tuscany, which is 470 metres above sea level and is surrounded by 24 hectares of organic vineyards.
Luciano was born and grew up in Siena. As a teenager, he worked briefly in the gardens of Villa Gamberaia outside Florence, and it was there he first encountered the ordered green universe of Italian garden tradition – a world of geometry, harmony, proportion, rhythm, repetition and scale. Influenced by his experiences there, at the age of 21 he left Italy for London, to study garden design, and later set up his own studio. For just over two decades, Luciano has run a busy practice, travelling constantly between projects in England, continental Europe, the US and North Africa. But it was not until 2015 that he was commissioned to make his first garden back on Tuscan soil, at Fabbrica in the Val d’Orcia.
The Val d’Orcia stretches from the hills south of Siena to Mount Amiata, a dormant volcano where Luciano used to ski as a boy. There is an exhilarating quality to its landscapes: the intense beauty of cornfields, olive groves and cypresses, but also something raw, elemental and uncompromising.
Receding horizons of bleached-out ridges turn the view into a vast relief map. When Anglo-American writer Iris Origo arrived to renovate the estate of La Foce with her husband in the Twenties, she likened the terrain to the surface of the moon.
Since receiving this commission, Luciano has visited La Foce repeatedly to see the extraordinary gardens Iris and the designer Cecil Pinsent conceived and planted there between 1927 and 1939. These continue to be nurtured and developed by Iris’s elder daughter, Benedetta Lysy. On steep ground that Iris herself despairingly characterised as ‘a dust heap’, she and Cecil created a richly layered composition in which everything speaks to everything else.
As Luciano observes about La Foce, ‘Everywhere you look, the formality of the vertical and horizontal sits alongside the wavering, the undulating and the interrupted – against the backdrop of this ancient landscape, every element has a heightened significance.’ His visits are important, both for studying the gardens and for the rich resource of his conversations with Benedetta. He goes to La Foce, he says, ‘when I need to look and when I want to question what I think I know’.
Like La Foce, the garden at Fabbrica is a masterclass in dialogue between different elements: the courtyard has a more formal character than other parts of the garden. Each component – the two evergreen oak hedges planted on the slant, the umbrella pine tree, the volumes of clipped box and the stone water trough – is placed with the precision of a piece in a game of chess. When you sit on the bench as the shadows lengthen, experiencing a sense of enclosure, the impact of Luciano’s childhood growing up in a walled city is clear, as is the acknowledged influence of the 20th-century Florentine landscape architect Pietro Porcinai.
The adjacent orto (vegetable garden) takes the structural clarity of the courtyard and adds abundance, mixing fruits, vegetables and herbs with peonies, dahlias and climbing roses. Articulated in hornbeam, box hedges, paved paths, water and a pergola of white wisteria, its repeating geometries and embedded patterns draw on the archetypes of cloister and hortus conclusus (enclosed garden), with the associated rituals of meditation, contemplation and growth.
It is in the Mediterranean garden that the sequence of spaces at Fabbrica reaches its apotheosis in an astonishing profusion of flowers and aromatics. With echoes of La Foce, the surrounding landscape is co-opted as part of the design, in the manner of a Renaissance painting. Sinuous beds of iris, hollyhocks, cistus, euphorbia, rosemary, knautia, clematis, verbena, salvia, verbascum and hellebores curve and flex in response to one another, in an endless dance that is both organic and meticulously considered. The composition reflects the time Luciano has spent at Great Dixter in East Sussex in recent years. There, he has explored planting possibilities in a specially designated experimental bed with head gardener Fergus Garrett and James Horner, who has gone on to work closely with Luciano on several projects, including this garden.
If the narrative of the Fabbrica garden embodies Luciano’s personal evolution as a designer, it is also the narrative of his studio’s development. For him, a collaborative approach is key in challenging the creative process and pushing beyond the limitations of a familiar language. Every project, he is keen to stress, is a product of the involvement of each member of his purposefully small studio – no one more so than Alessandra Pizzetti, a fellow Sienese, whose instincts and judgment Luciano trusts implicitly. As the work at Fabbrica continues, so will the conversations, the collaborations and the creative evolution.
Luciano Giubbilei: lucianogiubbilei.com
Andrew Montgomery1/7The burgundy flowers of the tall bearded iris ‘Medici Prince’ and purple spires of Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’ and Phlomis purpurea stand out against pale Calamintha nepeta and Stachys byzantina in the Mediterranean garden.
Andrew Montgomery2/7An olive tree underplanted with rosemary and Euphorbia characias ‘Black Pearl’ stands near a path edged with silver-leaved Stachys byzantina and white Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’.
Andrew Montgomery3/7In the courtyard, a Quercus ilex hedge and box topiary provide a strong contrast with the pale concrete trough.
Andrew Montgomery4/7On a sloping lawn, neat drums of Buxus sempervirens and lines of Tuscan travertine create a formal effect, softened by oak, fig and olive trees.
Andrew Montgomery5/7The Mediterranean garden includes the burgundy Iris ‘Medici Prince’ and silvery mounds of Helichrysum italicum and Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’
Andrew Montgomery6/7Almond trees, columnar Cupressus sempervirens ‘Pyramidalis’ and evergreen oak Quercus ilex are the backdrop for a planting scheme in the Mediterranean garden, which features ruby red Iris ‘War Chief’, pink Cistus x skanbergii, Abelia x grandiflora ‘Prostrate White’ and Stachys byzantina.
Andrew Montgomery7/7A stone bench offers a chance to pause on an elegant walkway flanked by low hedges of clipped Buxus sempervirens. Overhead, an arched pergola is swathed in Wisteria floribunda ‘Alba’ and roses, including creamy white ‘Félicité Perpétue’ and pale pink ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’.
