How can one tell a story that is Sicilian, Italian, Mediterranean, marine, and volcanic, just where the countryside is remarkably fertile but natural elements are so strong that it always feels like a mythological story? How can one build a garden that will become an icon for Radicepura Biennale del Paesaggio del Mediterraneo, in the very place where culture has been merging with the strength of nature for thousands of years now? I found my inspiration in the site’s potential, in one of my favourite regions: a place rich with craftspeople, romantic visionaries tightly knit to their land and great farmers. A magic as simple as the old saia, the ducts lovingly watering the garden – which means an orchard to Sicilians: the zappeddu, the watering sluice that allows life to flow in Sicily, shall start it all. As the saia opens, the water flowing in the garden ebbs and flows like a tide: water loses its way along meandering mazes, it quenches thirst, submerges, impregnates, and purifies. The garden’s fragrant flowers bloom in the Sicilian night. At the centre of the garden, we designed a large chessboard made with local basalt stone extracted from the volcano’s outflow, where you can walk or stay, interspersed with luxuriant, seductive vegetation: it is not black and white anymore, but black and green. For me, designing this garden for Fondazione Radicepura was a huge privilege, in a unique place under the Etna active volcano, looking at the sea on one of Italy’s most fertile tropical terrains. Homeground is a garden with modern lines, that merge, and will increasingly merge as time goes by, with the lush vegetation, in line with Sicily’s ancient heritage of cultivating new plants.
A secret pathway amongst the Cycas, a large parterre of tropical fruit, mango, lychee, Annona, rose apple and many others, to rest or walk in patches of sun and shade, a third space enshrouded in jasmines and shadowed by Brachychiton where you can sit and find refreshing running water.
Then comes basalt, lava solidified in huge candlesticks, simply cut and preserved in its natural shape to become the seductive body of the garden where one can sit, under a fragrant frangipani, to get out of time. Stone slabs covering in water borrow their voice from the aphorisms of Gaetano Zoccali, whilst the remarkable plants from the Faro nursery are ever so many, maybe too many, but they were a pure temptation that was impossible to fight back: Cycas, Plumeria, Brachychiton, Hedychium, Cestrum, Cereus, Erythrina…
Special thanks to Natale Torre; besides being an inexhaustible source of inspiration for years now, he offered his most precious plants to complete the fruits’ core choice.
