Side Trip: Ephrussi Garden, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

FROM NICE LAST TUESDAY, when clouds reigned, I took a half-hour bus ride up into the hills above the coast (itself worth it for the views). I was headed to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where the Baroness Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild, between 1905 and 1912, built a fanciful pink villa overlooking the Mediterranean, surrounded by a series of thematic gardens. They are spectacularly beautiful, as are the views of the sea.

I made short work of the villa, full of Sèvres procelain, Gobelins tapestries and Old Master paintings; I was too eager to be outside. But the audioguide filled me in Béatrice’s early marriage to an associate of her father’s, the banker Alphonse de Rothschild; their eventual separation; and how, after the creation of these artful and enduring gardens, she spent the last decades of her life gambling at Monaco.

But that’s neither here nor there. The gardens are very much here (thanks in part to Culturespaces, the French equivalent of Britain’s National Trust), and available to visit year-round. There’s an atmospheric tea room that shares the villa’s decor and vistas, so no worries about lunch.

There’s a Spanish garden, below…

and a Florentine garden, below, both of which instantly evoked those places for me.

There’s also small Japanese garden; an Exotic or cactus garden, with specimens I had never seen; a Rose garden, barren at this time of year; a wild Provencal garden that was the least structured of them; and the more formal French garden nearest the villa, which contains music fountains that spew water and Mozart every twenty minutes.

Ornamental Edibles

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THE DREAMING CONTINUES…the stack of gardening books on my coffee table grows…the sketches of my garden-to-come (six days ’til closing!) proliferate. I’ve realized that the area I’m considering for a vegetable patch — the only cleared, and hence sunny, area on the property at the moment — and my front entry garden, just inside the future parking court, are one and the same. It’s also the spot — quite a large spot, roughly 1,000 square feet — that forms the front ‘yard’ and view from the future guest cottage, as well as being the central circulation core of the entire property (yes, all 1/2 acre of it).

So this space needs to function on many levels, including directing people toward the house, and not toward the compost heap, when they step out of the car. And of course, it needs to look good.

These musings led me to Google ‘ornamental edible garden’ (and order a couple more books on the subject). I’d read about how veggies/herbs, flowers, and other plants were combined at  Mount Vernon and Monticello (and before that, in the cottage gardens of European peasants). I’m a great admirer of the attractive edibles garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, above, which seems to thrive into the winter with snazzy diagonal rows of spinach and kale and parsley going strong. And my Internet explorations revealed that ornamental edibles are a super-trendy trend in both urban and rural settings, with blogs aplenty devoted to them.

I’m a newbie at vegetable gardening. My only experience is a semi-successful tomato patch at my prior Brooklyn rental in Boerum Hill, where I planted way too many tomato starters in two 4’x8′ raised beds and spent much of the summer trying to keep them under control, but also got some very tasty tomatoes.

So I have a load of questions and concerns. First, what will such a garden look like in the off-season? Pretty uninspiring, I should think, covered mostly with mulch. It will need some evergreen structure. Second, vegetable gardens need a lot of water. How sustainable is that? Am I prepared to irrigate or hand-water intensively through the summer? Is my well? Third, how do vegetable beds jibe with my overarching concept of a Japanese-inspired garden? I’ve Googled ‘Japanese vegetable garden,’ you can be sure, but came up with not much more than how to grow Japanese vegetables.

Herewith, some photos from other sites, each with ideas I can glean for my purposes. As always, your thoughts are most welcome.

How gorgeous is this? Brick paths between wedge-shaped beds…there’s a massive pile of brick behind the house that I’ve wondered what to do with, but it’s labor-intensive to lay and perhaps not in keeping with the rustic materials palette (gravel, wood chips) I had in mind.

rocklandmastergardener.blogspot.com. This one rises out of the lawn (I’m not planning on any lawn — none), but I relate to how it’s surrounded by tall trees.

tillyscottage.com

Variations on the wood-framed raised bed theme, separated by paths of gravel

Raised beds made of cinder blocks, cottage-y picket fence and twiggy arbor. I’m figuring, since the whole property is fenced, I won’t need to surround the veggies with any additional fencing. I’ve never had to deal with rabbits, woodchucks, etc. at my other East Hampton property — only deer.

Mix’n’match paving

BOOK REVIEW Garden Guide: New York City

NEW YORK in 2011 is truly a great garden city. World-class, I’d venture to say. Yet, as Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry point out in the newly revised edition of Garden Guide: New York City (W.W. Norton, $22.95), as recently as 10 years ago, people were puzzled to hear they were writing such a guide. Gardens in New York City? Really? Are there enough to fill a whole book?

<-Greenacre Park, East 51st Street

Now there can be no doubt. In the past decade, there’s been a great flowering, if you will, of gardens and landscape installations all over the five boroughs. There are the obvious, most impressive recent ones, like Chelsea’s High Line — the conversion of rusty elevated rail line into a well-used planted park — and landscaping efforts at the Battery in lower Manhattan, where Dutch designer Piet Oudolf has brought a naturalistic new aesthetic to the riverfront.

The book calls attention to gardens that have been around a long time, but that I’ll bet a lot of newish arrivals to the city (and maybe some oldish ones) don’t quite realize are there, including the attractive, well-maintained botanic gardens in Queens and at Snug Harbor in Staten Island, where they are interspersed among picturesque Greek Revival houses.

Even I, a NYC resident of 40+ years, just ‘discovered’ what the book calls “the crown jewel” of New York City gardens — the Conservatory Garden at 105th street and Fifth Avenue, six acres of romantic magnificence in all seasons — within the last few.

Irish Hunger Memorial, Battery Park City ->

<-High Line

Conservatory Garden

Garden Guide: New York City covers more than 100 gardens open to the public, including the Lotus Garden on West 97th Stret, the only rooftop community garden in New York City; urban farms from the Bronx to Red Hook; and the small plots around such historic houses as the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, and the Mount Vernon Hotel on East 61st Street (formerly known as the Abigail Adams house).

Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum ->

Many of NYC’s gardens are concealed in some way — inside museums, hidden behind skyscrapers, up on rooftops. Probably none of us knows New York City’s gardens as well as we might. This chunky little guide feels good in the hand, fits neatly in the glove compartment, and insures that no weekend need pass without discovering some new-to-you refuge of green.

Valencia’s River of Green

VALENCIA IS FULL OF MADDING CROWDS RIGHT NOW — the week-long Fallas festival,which takes place March 15-19 as it has for hundreds of years — involves lots of noise, color, and activity. Brass bands march through the streets, following parades of girls from toddlerhood to adolescence in elaborate brocade and lace costumes. The sound of firecrackers is incessant, and the city’s ancient plazas and narrow streets are closed to cars but thronged with people.

Fortunately, when you start to feel like a man or woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Valencia has no shortage of tranquil green space to which to retreat. The city’s central axis is the singular Turia park, a 5-1/2 mile-long artery of green in a re-purposed riverbed.

I had to see it up close, so this morning, with the weather typically sunny and warm — after spending a bit of time milling with the crowds preparing for today’s Fallas ceremonies (bedecking a colossal statue of the Virgin with flowers, for one) — I descended a steep flight of stairs to investigate.

Like almost all European cities, Valencia was established — by the Romans in 138 B.C. — on the banks of a river. The old city grew up inside a bend of the Rio Turia, a few miles inland from the Mediterranean. It persisted through Iberian, Moorish, and Christian times, but the wide river was prone to flooding, and in 1957, it flooded once too often, taking about a hundred lives. The city undertook to divert the river’s course and, in an enlightened move, rather than create a super-highway, the original Turia riverbed was converted to parkland.

The Turia is still crisscrossed with bridges — some 500 years old, others ultra-modern, like Santiago Calatrava’s “Comb,” below. The singular riverbed park is bookended at by the Bioparc, the animal habitat that is a chief pride of the city, and at the other by Calatrava’s glittering $3billion City of Arts & Sciences, which we will visit tomorrow.

Today, the Jardines de Turia seemed a true oasis of calm, with just a few bikers, picnickers, sunbathers, and dog-walkers along its length. Parts of the park are given over to playing fields and tennis courts; other stretches contain grassy lawns studded with native palms, banyans, and fruit trees beginning to bloom. The area near the hotel where my press group is staying has a more formal boxwood topiary design.

Alongside the Turia is the Monforte garden around a onetime private villa, below, often described as romantic, but I could only peer up at the cypresses towering above its gates; I found it closed today.

The much larger Jardines de Real (also called Los Viveros), once the grounds of an artistocratic family, form a sort of wing to the Turia, with plantings of box and bay, flowering shrubs, and early spring bulbs, and a pleasant cafe and fountains where it joins the Turia near the Museo de Bellas Arts, below, second only to Madrid’s Prado for Spanish ecclesiastical art.

Some day, the area around Valencia’s Estacion de Norte, below, built during the city’s 1920s expansion in its characteristic Modernismo style, will also be parkland. A new 57-acre Parque Central has been designed by the London-based firm Gustafson Porter, with bowl-shaped lawns and spectacular water features.

In the meantime, Valencia is already a city built for park-hopping.

Rancho La Puerta: Garden Close-Up

I’M HOME FROM RANCHO LA PUERTA and not too happy about that. The sun is shining here in East Hampton, N.Y., and things have greened up slightly. The daffodils are still in force; my scrawny magnolia is in what passes for full bloom. But the goutweed is also back in full force, and the expanses of brown dirt seem enormous. I prefer to remain at Rancho for a while longer, at least in my head. I’m thinking back on the past week of sun-soaked floral abundance and wondering how I can transpose all I saw and learned there, in some small way, to my Northeastern half-acre.

Last Thursday at Rancho, I took the Landscape Garden Walk with Enrique Ceballos, below, the person most responsible — after Sarah Livia Brightwood, daughter of the Ranch’s founders and a landscape architect — for the phenomenal landscaping of the Ranch’s eight exuberantly cultivated acres. A former botany professor, he has been involved with the Ranch since 1988 and knows everything there is to know about its horticultural bounty.

It wasn’t really much of a walk; we joked about that afterwards. We began under the gazebo in the central area, near the main guest lounge, and because the plantings are so intensive, and the large group so enthusiastic and inquisitive, we barely moved from our starting point in the allotted hour, yet there was plenty to see. We walked perhaps 50 feet in all, as Enrique gave us some background on the climate (double the normal rainfall in the past year, which is why this spring is so green), the alkaline soil, and the highly eco-conscious philosophy of Rancho La Puerta’s garden maintenance program (I saw only one sprinkler going the whole week; of course, the water is all reclaimed and recycled).

“This is a landscape with no chemicals,” Enrique stressed. No pesticides: insects are welcome (some prey on others, he pointed out, so why kill the helpful ones?) No herbicides: hand-weeding is preferred. No slug-icides, either: the birds take care of that.

The aesthetic intent, he said, is to create “an abstraction of the chapparal inside the garden,” with contours and rhythms that echo the shapes of the surrounding terrain. I now know that chapparal is the native eco-system in the foothills of Mt. Kuchumaa, considered sacred by the area’s original inhabitants;  the mountain dominates the Ranch’s longer vistas, partly because the design is intended to do just that.

The Ranch uses either native plants or “eco-equivalents” – plants from similar climatic conditions, particularly the Mediterranean region, which are not native but thrive and grow like natives. A ubiquitous example is rosemary, which I never walked past without picking a sprig and holding it to my nose. It was introduced to Baja by Franciscan monks from Italy, Enrique told us.

Some of the highlights of our “walk”:

• AGAVES – 80% of which are from Mexico, we learned. They bloom once, spectacularly, and then die, in a 7-year life span. There are eight different agave species at the Ranch.
• ALOES – these are eco-equivalents from Africa. The coral aloes, below at right (with orange gazanias to the left of them), now in bloom throughout the property, are outstanding. I couldn’t get enough of looking at them.



• MONTEZUMA PINES – pale green and feathery
• EUCALYPTUS TREES – Enrique called them a “big weed, aggressive and flammable.” He is not a fan of eucalyptus.
• GAZANIAS (African daisies) – orange flowers, below, with delicate magenta undersides and juicy succulent stems, they are used in big drifts for sheets of color.



• EUPHORBIA – not the type we have here, but recognizable, with chartreuse flowers
• NANDINA (Heavenly Bamboo) – now bursting with red berries, below



• FRENCH LAVENDER – not part of this walk, but used to great effect, below, along with tall Italian cypresses and more of that fabulous coral aloe, around the circular fountain in the Villas Luna area



• CALIFORNIA PEPPER TREE – huge and venerable, resembling weeping willow, on the lawn near the dining hall, below



• ROCK ROSE, or cistus – a marvelous, rather funny-looking pink flower, below, with red triangles inside



• SALVIA (sage) – there are 25-28 species, native and non-native, all well suited to the Ranch’s conditions
• ARTEMISIAS – semi-desert plants which do very well at the Ranch
• DATE PALMS from the Mideast, QUEEN PALMS from Africa, others from California
• ICE PLANTS – wonderful architectural feature, used everywhere for big drifts of color (such as the pink ‘river’ in photo at top)
• ECHEVERIA (Hens & Chicks), below – gigantic, compared to our Northeastern varieties



• TRUMPET VINES – invasive elsewhere but here, said Enrique, all that’s necessary to control them is to cut their water supply
• WISTERIA, now having their moment on pergolas throughout the Ranch, originally from China
• STAR JASMINE – many different types on arbors
• PYROCANTHA – red-berried and not native, but successful
• ROSES – many species throughout – the most magnificent, to me, are the yellow ‘Lady Banks’ on the pergola near the Montana gym, below

You can see why we didn’t get far. The above list represents just a fraction of the Ranch’s plantings. And I understand the wildflowers in the upper altitudes of Mt. Kuchumaa, reached only on the 5.5 mile Coyote hike (which I chickened out of, preferring to save some energy for Bar Method, swimming, and African dance) are beyond belief.

For more on Rancho La Puerta, go here, and see my two previous posts below.