La Petraia: A Tuscan garden with an English feel

La Petraia: A Tuscan garden with an English feel

English head gardener Will Smithson shows us around the "garden rooms" at this Chianti property.

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Fri 06 Sep 2024 3:02 PM

The tips of the cypresses are nodding along the final stretch of the dusty drive to La Petraia, a few miles from Radda in Chianti. Not to be confused with the eponymous Medici villa, the Tuscan home of Rob and Bridget Pinchbeck is a masterclass in garden design by the internationally renowned Arne Maynard.

La Petraia’s head gardener Will Smithson is patiently waiting by the gate into the hilltop property, which used to be the site of an Etruscan fort. The sun is beating down on the reclaimed pietra serena courtyard planted with topiaries and cork oaks, a formal entrance beside an ancient stone wash tub repurposed as a water feature. “In 2018, Arne and I were on a tree tagging trip in Belgium. Whilst there, he was tagging trees for a separate project in Italy and, on hearing this, my ears pricked up. My wife, Mel, has Italian ancestry through her grandparents, so we were excited about the potential opportunity of moving here. We took the leap and moved to Tuscany in 2020 during lockdown.”

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We follow Will through the kitchen to the front terrace, where the paving continues in a less formal and more contemporary style. “This was a sloping lawn, so we terraced it and brought in umbrella-trained London plane trees, the ones we tagged in Belgium, to create a natural shaded arbour.” An elegant statue by Grosseto-based British sculptor Emily Young provides a focal feature beside the alfresco dining area, but what steals the show are the vast valley views as far as Siena as bees and butterflies go about their business. Will points out the pretty pink and white Gaura ‘Whirling Butterflies’, which I’ve seen all over Tuscany this summer. “The brief was to create a Tuscan garden with an English feel. Everything is planted in a soft, meadow-like fashion, using mainly Mediterranean plants, with topiary and roses dotted throughout.”

Prior to moving to Tuscany, Will worked for Arne Maynard at South Wood Farm in Devon, so comparisons with English horticulture come naturally. “There, the seasons are much longer, with colour all summer and beyond, whereas here, the garden peaks in June and then goes into a summer dormancy, so we have to rely more on form and structure. After Ferragosto, there are normally storms and we then get a second flush of flowers, especially the roses.”

Now we’re in the cut flower garden on the sloping terrace, where the dahlias display buds, ready to bloom as soon as rain begins to make an appearance. “In the UK there’s loads of variety when it comes to cut flower seeds. In Italy there’s quite a limited palate. I’ve had to think outside the box to find different sources.”

Will walks me through what he refers to as the “garden rooms”. Giant diggers stripped the entire terrace back to bare earth before a vegetable garden was created at the top, a herb garden in the middle and the aforementioned flower garden at the bottom. “We added pergolas that act as natural full stops to divide the rooms.” On the torrid August day when we visit, it’s hard to make out the shades, but the colour palette of each “room” is based on Renaissance paintings by the likes of Bronzino.

Being deep in the countryside, fending off pests, such as wolves, badgers and porcupines, continues to be an issue. “Rob and Bridget purchased a property in the UK called Benton End, which was owned by the famous artist and iris breeder Cedric Morris. The property is currently being restored by the Garden Museum. So, the plan was to incorporate as many of those irises in the garden as possible, but unfortunately the majority were eaten by porcupines early on in the project and we had to replant them…Long story short, I thought we’d solved the problem. I was away for Ferragosto, but when I arrived back on Monday, to my horror, they had somehow managed to get in and eat a large proportion of the irises again. They’re so desperate in this heat that they try to come in here most evenings looking for something to eat. It’s like a sweet shop for them.”

Open gardens haven’t yet caught on in Italy, but the presence of an English head gardener in the depths of Tuscany has intrigued a few of the villagers. “It’s only when other people come that I actually look at the view and you think, wow, look where we are.”

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