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Benvenuto!!

I am a qualified agronomist and trained horticulturist with a passion for creative gardening and growing crops. Every month on the gardening info section I will update plant of interest, events, calendar, gardening topics, plants or any horticultural issues that i want to share!

Feel free to express any thoughts about any aspects of horticulture!

Ficus macrophylla ssp. columnaris

"look at some of my favourite gardens"

Villa Gamberaia

This relatively small estate (about a hectare) combines the architectural and landscaping wisdom and know-how of three centuries, from the seventeenth to the twentieth, and offers a truly wonderful view, the gaze spreading out from the hill over the built-up area of Settignano "of which it exploits the ancient terracing" spacing onto the city of Florence and onto the valley of the river Arno.

The villa, built on sculptor Rossellino's modest native house, was finished in 1610. The existing austere evergreens with colored roses and flowers and turning the eighteenth-century garden into the Italian-style garden in front of the villa, carefully playing with heights and voids, in which water expanses skilfully delimited by trimmed boxwood replace the parterres.

Chelsea Physic Garden

A seventeenth century enclosed garden. It was made, in 1673, as a garden in which to grow plants for medicinal purposes and, though it is still a botanical garden, has the appearance of an ornamental garden with regular walks.

The garden's position near the Thames was chosen to allow non-native plants to grow in the warmer microclimate created by the river. As the second oldest botanic garden in England it still fulfills the traditional functions of scientific research and plant conservation and undertakes to educate and inform as well as to provide the amenity of a walled "secret" garden in the heart of London.

Royal Palace of Caserta a UNESCO World Heritage Site

The universally famous Royal Palace of Caserta is the pride of all the magnificent works and constructions by which the Bourbon dynasty adorned and modernised the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The construction of the palace was begun in 1752 for Charles VII of Naples, who worked closely with his architect Luigi Vanvitelli.

He was called to Naples by King Charles of Bourbon, who, as real grandchild of the Roi Soleil, wanted to build a new Royal Palace, a “residence” fit for a Bourbon King and his Court. The palace - in the King’s intentions - had to be the most beautiful and largest royal palace in the world after Versailles, a pride for the new Kingdom he had conquered and a further evidence of his willingness to make this Kingdom an independent and sovereign one.

La Mortella

In the environs of Forio, one of the most picturesque villages on the island of Ischia, lies 'La Mortella', the splendid garden created by Susana, the wife of William Walton, one of the most important twentieth-century British composers.

In 1956, eminent landscape architect Russell Page planned the layout of the garden on existing rocky lava formations. The garden is divided into two parts: a lower garden in the Valley, and an upper garden on the hill, with vertical terraces cut directly into the rock and held by dry-stone walls; it covers a wide area and houses a collection of over 3000 species of rare exotic plants.

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