Gardens bloom at foot of the Alps
Lago Maggiore is home to three very different botanical sanctuaries
When I was growing up in Italy, it was almost mandatory for well-heeled northerners to summer on the sun-warmed lakes at the foot of the Alps. Boats would dock at island gardens, people took slow promenades along the shore followed by a leisurely Sunday meal on the leafy veranda of, say, Albergo Verbano, where Arturo Toscanini, George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Hemingway, to name notable guests, once stayed. The lakes’ legacy goes back to the ancient Romans and continues today.
And nearly as old is the rivalry among these lakes — Como, Garda, and Maggiore — for first place in the beauty pageant. All boast a Mediterranean microclimate cradled by soaring snowcrusted Alps.
But in the 17th century, the prominent Borromeo family transformed a minuscule rocky island on Lago Maggiore into a baroque botanical masterpiece. This island, called Isola Bella, and its majestic gardens rose to international Grand Tour destination fame.
A short train ride from Milan to Stresa makes Lago Maggiore an easy weekend retreat. To avoid crowds and humidity, I recommend visiting in spring or early fall.
It’s an early morning in May, and I’m standing on the veranda of the venerable Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees, facing the Alps, which appear in smooth blue-purple unison. Behind me is Mount Mottarone, famous for its stunning 360-degree panoramas, and well worth a visit. In front of me, boats criss-cross the Borromean Gulf. Besotted amateur gardener that I am, I’m here for the gulf’s botanical sanctuaries: Isola Bella, Isola Madre and Villa Taranto.
The Borromeo family name is inescapable, because they own multiple properties and remain the darlings of high- society papers. My sights are set on their head horticulturist, Gianfranco Giustina, who oversees Isola Bella’s and Isola Madre’s gardens. In 2014, he was awarded the British Royal Horticultural Veitch Memorial Medal, for persons “who have made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of the art, science or practice of horticulture.”
On Isola Bella, Guistina explains the difference between Isola Bella’s 17th- century baroque gardens, in which “man’s genius for architecture is in important collaboration with formal garden structures,” and Isola Madre’s 19th-century English gardens, which “make plants the protagonists in a feat of natural landscaping.” And a feat both gardens are, employing 23 full-time gardeners, plus 10 parttimers, for the kind of off-season work that requires barges of soil, helicopter transports, topiary sculpting and tree-trimming.
If Isola Bella is perfectly coiffed, Isola Madre lets her hair down. Isola Bella is a grand public performance, but Isola Madre is designed to feel magically private. Shaded arches of wisteria lead into winding paths bordered by soaring 20-foot (6 metre) hedges. These lush green walls of laurel, myrtle and camellia create hide-and-seek turns, out of which pop Chinese pheasants, long-tailed red and yellow parrots, and white and bluegreen peacocks, creating a busy ornithological soundscape. The sunnier lake exposures boast the Africa road, avenue of palms and citrus tree walk.
Preserving these venerable gardens is no easy matter. In 2006, a tornado uprooted Isola Madre’s massive rare Kashmir Cypress planted in 1862. The ensuing struggle to save the now reinstated tree is credited as a major success for Giustina, who worked with a cadre of botanists, engineers and technicians. In 2012, a tornado felled over 300 trees on Villa Taranto. It’s my next stop, in Pallanza, across the Borromean Gulf.
Villa Taranto’s park-like gardens ascend nearly 330 feet (100 metres) of hillside shaded by enormous conifers. Along the paths are cooling magnolia woods, mossy sunken fern valleys, or the hand- waving Japanese maples. Horticulturist Franco Caretti points to his favourite successes: a flourishing dawn redwood long thought extinct, the shy-to-flower Man Yang tree, which resists cultivation yet suddenly bloomed in 1971, and the magnificent, huge Santa Cruz (or water platter) water lily, apparently used as floating cradles by Paraguayan mothers doing laundry.
The evening boat picks up its last stragglers. Sunset ripples over Lago Maggiore, and the Alps turn dark green-purple. It’s a night’s rest for the Eden of Italy.