Philip’s Garden Blog

The Garden of La Foce located in the Val d’Orcia region of Southern Tuscany is considered one of the great gardens of the 20th century. The garden is indeed beautiful, in an incomparable setting; it is the story behind the creation of the garden and the events which took place there during World War II, however, which makes this garden so compelling. The story of La foce is of the restoration of a land and the spirit of its people, and of human decency and personal heroism  in a wretched time of war.

Newlyweds Iris and Antonio Origo seached for a place where they could make a difference, when in in 1923 with the impetuosity of youth the couple purchased La Foce. Located in the wilds of the Crete Senesi, La Foce was far removed from the Tuscan countryside of ordered gardens and tidy vines of Iris’ childhood. The Villa Medici where Iris had grown up was a remarkable Renaissance villa overlooking Florence; art, beauty and the aroma of luxury pervaded. In contrast, La Foce had few roads other than a rutted cart track. There was no electricity, no telephone and most importantly very little water. The soil had seriously eroded over centuries, and the forests decimated. The farms on the estate were all in great disrepair. The people had little access to health care and education; the land was a desert, its people wary.

Working together, Antonio and the people of the estate addressed erosion and added arable land, dug wells, ditches, added livestock and improved farms with electricity and lavatories. Roads were built to connect the isolated farms with the result that children could attend the school Iris set up (in a region with 80% illiteracy) and people could visit the dispensory (ambulatario) in times of sickness.

All energies and capital had gone into improving the farms, but the gift of a water pipe to a spring six miles away by Iris’ American grandmother meant that the house had an abundant water supply for the first time. Iris called upon her friend, the architect and noted landscape designer Cecil Pinsent to create the garden plan. Iris first met Cecil when he restored the grounds of her mother’s estate in Fiesole, and Pinsent employed a similar approach at la Foce. The first garden to be created was just off the Villa. Terraces were shaded by a wisteria clad pergola, and clipped box centered a fountain with dolphin supports resting in a cartouche shaped pool.

A few years later a larger terrace was linked to the house by geometic clipped box headed by twin pillars of travertine surmounted by urns. Pinsent’s use of strong form gave the garden structure, and evoked qualities found in Tuscan Renaissance gardens.

While Pinsent gave the garden bones, Origo added flowering plants. She learned along the way what would survive in the gardens conditions. Delphiniums, phlox, and the like had to be rejected, but lavender grew in profusion and roses flourished despite the clay soil. Stone steps connected the various parts of the garden. On an upper level a wide pergola clothed in wisteria created a bower.

Large terra cotta pots on stone bases planted with lemon trees studded the landscape

The lower garden is pure Pinsent with its theatrical composition of cypress hedges, clipped box and large trees of Magnolia grandiflora

I was moved to visit La foce after reading her remarkable memoir “War in Val d’Orcia”. Written as a diary during world war II, Origo recorded a dreadful period when the war itself came to La Foce. Origo opened her home to 24 children evacuated from Genoa and Turin and provided food and refuge for 200 partisans hiding in the woods and farms on the estate.  Origo writes:

So at last the old barriers of tradition and class were broken down, and we were held together by the same difficulties, fears, expectations and hopes. Together we found shelter for the fugitives who knocked on our door-whether Italians, Allies or Jews, soldiers or civilians-together we watched the first bombs fall on the bridges of the Val d’Orcia, and listened hopefully for the rumours of landings in Tuscany which never came. And together-when the Germans had turned us out of the cellar which had become our air raid shelter and had obliged us to walk to Montepulciano with all the refugee children and our own, as well as three new born babies - we came home after the allies’ arrival to bury the corpses in the woods and farms, to reap the harvest, to remove the mines still concealed in the woods and farms and in our own front garden, and then rebuild the shattered farms.

On the road descending from the villa one can see that La Foce has preserved and protected its agrarian character.

Just after the war Iris Origo recognized that  many children were in need: the orphaned, the abandoned and the malnourished. A permanent children’s home was established in what had been the nursery for refugee children at La Foce. She created a place that was not like an institution, but a place where the children could feel they were a part of a family. Iris worked tirelessly to find adoptive parents for the children. She was not able to find places for all, and those children returned to La Foce as adults with their respective families for Easter and Christmas. La Foce was home.

For English and American travellers on the “Grand Tour” of Europe in the 19th century, Italy and most especially Florence, was the desirous destination of choice. The flower of the Renaissance, Florence offered not only intellectual pursuits in art and architecture, but also the promise of  “la dolce far niente” (carefree idleness).  Life was considerably less expensive in Florence for the English and American expatriate with inexpensive lodgings and atmospheric villas, and the Siren’s call of wine, sunny skies and an agreeable countryside proved irresistable. The “Anglo Florentines” as this group camed to be called actually constitued many nationalities and backgrounds.  But it is the poets such as the Brownings, Keats and Vernon Lee; artists such as John Singer Sargent and the wealthy Bohemians who inhabited the historic villas in the hills above Florence for whom this group is remembered.

Iris Origo writes of the Anglo Florentines in her memoir, Images and Shadows: “If they had a villa, though they scrupulously preserved the clipped box and cypress hedges of the formal Italian garden, they yet also introduced a note of home: a Dorothy Perkens rambling among the vines and the wisteria on the pergola, a herbaceous border on the lower terrace, and comfotable wicker chairs upon the lawn.”

It was into this milieu that Lady Sybil Cutting, recently widowed from her American husband, announced to her young daughter, Iris “This is where we are going to live.”  “Home” was the Villa Medici in Fiesole, the humanist masterwork of Michelozzo for Cosimo de’ Medici.

Built in the mid 15th century, The Villa Medici was a radical departure from the enclosed medieval estate villas which preceded its construction. Commanding a sloping site above Florence in Fiesole, the villa incorporated a mathematical relationship between the house and its related garden terraces. Never concieved as a working agricultural estate, the property was for the singular intellectual and aesthetic delight of its occupants.

After Lady Sybil’s purchase of the villa in 1911, the garden was restored to its original design by Cecil Pinsent and Geoffrey Scott, revealing its rigorous geometry. The young architects were in the process of creating one of the greatest of Anglo Florentine gardens on the neighboring estate of I Tatti when the young Iris first met them:  “No picnic or expedition was complete without Cecil, no luncheon or dinner party, without Geoffrey’s stories” (Images and Shadows).

The restored garden was the scene for numerous visitors and tea parties, and Iris dutifully escorted her mother’s guests, gleefully regaling the gullible with imagined Medici murders and wandering ghosts. It was to the wild slopes in an Ilex wood above the terraced gardens that Iris escaped and made her own domain: “The great stone blocks of the Etruscan wall were as good for climbing, with their easy footholds, as were the low-branched olive trees; the high grass between the rose bushes was the perfect place to lie hidden on a summer’s day, peering down, unseen, at the dwarfed figures of the grown-ups staidly conversing on the terrace far below.” (Images and Shadows).

Iris expressed that as a child the talk of garden design and art was overwhelming. She longed to escape with a book or kept busy with the picnic hamper. She shied away from Edith Wharton, and the art critic and owner of I Tatti , Bernard Berenson, with his olympian pronouncements. Years later she found she possesed information which, once consciously rejected, now informed her as to what a great garden could be.  Cecil Pinsent, now a great friend, helped her to create it: the garden of  La Foce.

Connected to San Francisco by the Golden Gate Bridge, Sausalito is protected from the marine winds of the
Pacific by the Marin headlands. Tendrils of fog never quite reach the tumbling gardens overlooking the bay.
Recently while strolling Sausalito’s many pedestrian footpaths, a resident affirmed the area  has seven different
micro-climates.  In a section of Sausalito with verdant, old gardens referred to as “The Banana Belt”,  
landscape designer Brandon Tyson has matched the Bohemian verve of the place with a garden for Linda Hothem
that combines original plant combinations, playful topiary and commissioned art.

A terraced slope secured by rock walls is planted in a  color story of orange and white. Vivid Calceolaria
“Kentish Hero” and mounds of Cuphea “Strybing Sunset” are contrasted with the fresh Iris “Frequent flyer”

In a corner of the garden, white flowering  and grey foliage plants predominate such as the fragrant Dianthus arenarius.

Pathways of mellow granite slabs are interplanted with Scotch moss Sagina subulata, 
Acorus gramineus and black mondo grass Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrecens’. Inky black grape
seed mulch (used throughout the garden) sets off the striking composition.

Restrained, dark colored borders backed by clipped hedges featuring Iris ‘Superstition’ with the black foliage
of Anthriscus ‘Ravenswing’ are on one side of the central lawn. Paired Japanese maples Acer palmatum disectum
‘Crimson Queen’ underplanted with  Echeveria ‘Afterglow’ add bronze accents flanking the steps to the lower garden.

Topiary, currently enjoying a resurgence in contemporary European gardens, add delight
and whimsy. A pair of signature topiary turtles command the central lawn. Equipped with
night spotlighting, the turtles are underplanted with Acorus sp. and black grapeseed mulch.

Espaliered trees in pots screen a sunny terrace. 

Comissioned works of art by artist Marsha Donohue reinforces the gardens themes and adds enrichment.

Assured, innovative, and with a great spirit of fun, this is a garden which has much to do with the happy
collaboration of those involved and the spirit of the region.