How To Maintain A Water Garden

THE ROMANTIC WATER GARDEN

Not many people have the chance to create a garden from a ruined medieval town set on a spectacularly steep mountainside. But we can imagine the delight of re-creating the town plan with plants, the tremendous opportunities given by hundreds of old stone buildings, now ruined and roofless, and the challenge of creating new bridges leaping the tumbling streams that rush down from the old wells and watering places.

For the Caetani family, this most romantic of garden sites was not a daydream but reality. Ninfa, near Rome, belonged to them even before the town was sacked in 1382. as a result of opposition to the pope of the day. In its heyday Ninfa was a sizeable community, boasting a cathedral and seven churches, but all was lost when it was laid waste by papal decree, and it lay deserted for six hundred years.

In the twentieth century, however, the Caetani family repossessed the derelict town with the intention of creating a garden among its streets and ruined buildings. In the 1920s Duke Gelasio Caetani began to drain the nearby marshes, home to swarms of malarial mosquitoes. He made sure that the walls of the old buildings were fully stabilized, and canalized the river that ran through the town. Meanwhile his English mother, the Duchess of Sermoneta, began — as Englishwomen do — to plant quantities of old-fashioned roses against the ancient walls. These loved the climate and the freedom to ramble over the old stones. She also planted cypresses, their sky-rocket shape so typical of the Italian landscape, along the lines of the old streets, to create punctuation marks and emphasize formality and axes. Other Mediterranean trees included the evergreen ilex and black walnuts (Jugtans nigra) as well as Magnolia grandiflora, well suited to the region. A vast reservoir was constructed to store enough water to keep this luxuriant planting healthy and flourishing.

At first, native Italian trees were favored, but gradually the old town became home to all manner of exotics. This was the inspiration of Marguerite Chapin, the American wife of Duke Gelasio's brother Roffredo. In the twenty- five years they spent living in the village — the medieval town hall had been restored and made into a home for Duke Gelasio — Roffredo and Marguerite planted a huge range of plants that thrived in the sheltered conditions, including Drimys winteri from Chile, Cladrastis sinensis from China, hoherias from New Zealand and Montezuma pines from Mexico. They also created more pools and rivulets tojoin the streams already flowing into the River Ninfa, which lies at the heart of the garden, adding new watery habitats and further romantic idylls.

Their daughter Lelia, an artist, continued to work on the garden at Ninfa with her husband, Hubert Howard, until her death in 1971. She lined the old pathways with bushes of rosemary, added more old roses and climbers up the walls, as her grandmother had done, and filled streams with white-flowering arum lilies (Zantedeschia aethiopica). There are no more members of the family tending the garden today, but the work continues through the Caetani Foundation.