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Monty’s adventures in Venice
To go to Venice in search of gardens might seem to be founded more in hope than expectation. No city is more beautiful or more romantic, but few would stake its claim to fame on horticulture. There are some public gardens, but space is so short and so hard won that gardens might seem an impossible luxury for most. But spend any time at all beyond the obligatory visit to St Mark’s Square and you will catch glimpses of plants in passing and snatches of possible gardens through gateways and doors. There is wisteria ref lected in the water as it falls in swags over a wall, a magnolia hedged between two buildings, or ivy capping a wall in green billows. The signs are elusive and enigmatic, with little clue as to the scale or content of any gardens within – but it is evidence that they are there.
Gardens are essentially rooted in earth and Venice is nothing if not a city of water. However, the two do combine and at times gloriously so. There are few better ways to start a day than stepping from one’s hotel straight into a boat and setting off down the back canals and opening out onto the Grand Canal early on a spring morning to visit gardens. No journey in any city in the world is more beautiful and the gardens are all integrally bound into this beauty rather than being exceptional.
Making gardens
Some of this is to do with the way that Venice’s existence depends upon the same contract with nature that every gardener deals with. It is a bargain whereby mankind manipulates and controls the natural world to make something beautiful and useful, but on licence – and that licence can be withdrawn by weather, negligence or misjudgement at any moment.
Every church, campanile, palazzo and fondamenta has had to be stolen from the waters and built on millions of wooden piles driven into the mud of the lagoon. Venice itself is actually made up of scores of islands, most of them tiny and interlaced with canals and bridges, as well as the thirty-odd inhabited larger islands in the lagoon. Despite the longevity of its medieval buildings and the incredible labour and engineering skill necessary to make them, there is the constant threat of the sea reclaiming its own. The city is slowly sinking and the waters slowly rising. It does not bode well. Every now and then an exceptional acqua alta sweeps away any sense of a firm footing. Despite having lasted with glory for over a thousand years it is a fragile, anxious relationship. This, of course, adds to the romanticism and gothic drama of Venice, worn by time and tide, dressed in fading finery as it slowly succumbs to the sea.
Historically gardens originated, as did the campi, from open fields and pieces of land where vegetables could be raised. As the campi were paved over the gardens remained, and other than on the Giudecca and the outlying
