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Imagine a valley where frost is unheard of, where great, fleshy camelia flowers bob on trees and lie fallen at one’s feet; where New Zealand tree ferns unfurl with prehistoric langour, and where the bulbous dragon tree of Madeira or the huge, sexually ambivalent Victoria amazonica water lily is at home. Imagine now that this valley is not in the tropics but in the Bay of Naples, on the island of Ischia.

It’s a small step, one might suppose, from oranges and lemons to amazon lilies. Not so; the Mediterranean climate is often decidedly untropical. Much, of course, can be done with greenhouses and a plentiful water supply; but Ischia has not a single freshwater spring. Today, drinking water arrives from the mainland via a marine pipeline; when Susana and William Walton bought the land on which their garden and later their house was built, in 1956, it arrived on the ferry by truck. Thinking back over her decision to turn this volcanic valley into a corner of the tropics, Lady Walton reflects: “I must have been totally, totally mad”.

The English composer and his young Argentinian wife first set foot on the island in 1949. Walton had fallen in love with the warm South in his undergraduate years, when his patrons, Osbert and Sachie Sitwell, had dragged the Oldham choirboy down to Amalfi in the summer break. After the war - and after his lightning courtship of Susana, who worked at the British Council in Buenos Aires - Walton announced to his new bride that they would not settle in grey London, but head south for the Bay of Naples. In 1956 they invested their funds in a rough, steep-sided piece of volcanic land that the composer’s friend Laurence Olivier dismissed as a “quarry”.

But Lady Walton had - and has - determination in bagfuls, and she managed to persuade the young but already celebrated landscape architect Russell Page to draw up a plan for this long, thin valley. In three days, Page came up with a L-shaped backbone for the garden, its stark geometry softened by the curve of the volcanic slopes and the lush plants which thrived in the dark, peaty topsoil (most of the rest of the island is covered in clay - “good only for making bricks”, according to Lady Walton). The garden was called La Mortella, the local word for myrtle.

The first seven years were dedicated to breaking stones, taming the crags into a series of walled terraces, and dealing with the water problem. Because the cistern truck brought drinking water for the whole island, the drivers refused to deliver during the day, claiming that the islanders would be shocked if they saw good water “wasted on flowers”. So Susana was forced to stay up all night to oversee the filling of her water tanks. The arrival of piped water from the mainland at the end of the fifties meant that fountains could at last be incorporated into Page’s original design.

It was not until five years after they bought the land that the Waltons began to think about building a house (until then they had been living in a converted wine cellar, rented from a local peasant). On such a rocky site it was the shape of the terrain that determined the plan - in particular, the need to exploit a level area halfway up the hill that would allow for a sitting room, dining room, kitchen and terrace to be squeezed in on the same floor. The rest of the house was built from here downwards, and clad in dark-grey, iron rich cement. Russell Page described the result as a Minoan palace; the locals were less complimentary, referring to it as la caserma (the barracks).

Now, though, merging in with the greenery and splashed with colour from the strawberry tree that breaks up the view from the terrace or the great, drooping peachy flowers of the datura down below, this mysterious, archaic house is an essential part of the overall effect. To the right of the main building is the music room, where Walton used to compose while his wife tended the plants, and beyond that an intimate theatre, where concerts are held between April and October. As well as helping to adminster the garden, the William Walton Trust, set up after the composer’s death in 1983, encourages young musicians and composers by arranging for study tours, giving them a chance to perform before a paying audience, and organising a masterclass in July and August.

La Mortella has always been an open house. Regular visitors to the house or the cottages on the grounds have included Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Kenneth Clark, Edward Heath, Julian Bream, Terence Rattigan and Hans Werner Henze. Even today there is a thin line between guests and paying visitors; Lady Walton is almost always in attendance, ready to tell the stories that lie behind every one of the carefully-tended plants: “those jacrandas grew from seeds I brought back from Argentina when I married William, before I even knew I wanted a garden... I stood on the roof of a taxi to gather the pods which that tree grew out of... look at that tree fern - it’s self-sown. This is slowly becoming the rain forest of Ischia...”

Even the tea shop, converted from a greenhouse and opened to the public last year, carries on the personal touch. Lady Walton proudly boasts that “It’s the only place in Italy where you can get real Fortnum & Mason tea”.

After immersing themselves in this small corner of a foreign land - or rather, of many foreign lands - visitors have been known to hug Lady Walton spontaneously: “people say thankyou, and leave in tears”. For a garden that was “built on the never-never, with the help of IOUs from the local grocer”, that is no mean achievement.

Great Italian Gardens
Until recently, anyone wanting to go on a tour of Italy’s historic gardens either had to put themselves in the hands of a specialist tour operator or be prepared to do a lot of homework, make a lot of phone calls and cajole a lot of reluctant conti and marchesi.

With a few exceptions - such as the Villa D’Este in Tivoli or the Villa Lante near Viterbo - the majority of the peninsula’s most beautiful gardens are still in private hands, and getting to see them has always depended very much on the availability of their aristoctatic owners, or - worse still - on the whims of a caretaker, installed by the banks or insurance companies that have acquired many properties as investments.

It was a frustrating experience, in view of Italy’s central role in the development of the modern European garden. After the Dark Ages, the Italian nobility can fairly said to have reinvented the garden as a rational ordering of the natural world. Fourteenth-century gardens like Gian Galeazzo Visconti’s walled park of Pavia or the Royal Gardens of Naples were among the first in Europe to break out of the castle and the cloister, and to embrace the Islamic idea of the garden as a source of pleasure rather than sustenance.

The last two centuries saw the tradition of the Italian garden fade; geometrical parterres were swept aside in favour of the sweeping vistas of the giardino all’inglese, and what survived suffered too often from lack of interest and lack of technique. Ironically enough, it was often the British - like tea magnate Sir Thomas Hanbury at Villa Hanbury in Ventimiglia, or retired Scots captain Neil McEacharn at Villa Taranto on Lake Maggiore - who gave the tradition new vitality by planting exotic gardens in which botany took precedence over design.

It seem apt, then, that an Englishwoman is currently helping Italians to rediscover their rich garden heritage. Judith Wade Bernardi came to live in the country 20 years ago. In 1995 she decided that it was about time that she “repaid some of the warmth and hospitality I’d been shown by doing something for Italy”. The result was Great Italian Gardens - or, to the locals, Grandi Giardini Italiani - a voluntary association which acts as a quality-control mark, a marketing company, a press office and a forum for exchanging advice and ideas.

One of the biggest obstacles facing potential visitors, she says, was the fact that most of the aristocratic owners of the 22 gardens currently involved in the scheme were not particularly strapped for cash, and saw no reason to open their private Edens to the public. But signora Wade Bernardi persuaded them that gardens that are not oohed and aahed over can hardly be said to exist, and by a mixture of cajolement and flattery talked the owners into providing more than just an address for written requests from interested scholars.

All the participating gardens now have, at the very least, phone numbers which groups or individuals can ring to arrange visits. A few, like Lady Susana Walton’s La Mortella go the whole hog, with opening times, a ticket booth and refreshments. Judith Wade is keen to stress not only the variety of opening arrangements, but the incredible botanical and climatic range - which runs from the near Alpine situation of the Villa Favorita, in Lugano, Switzerland, to the palms, jacarandas and succulents of the Casa del Biviere in Lentini, near Syracuse in Sicily. “Sometimes”, she says, “it’s difficult to believe they’re on the same continent, let alone in the same country”.

Visiting many of these gardens may still require a phone call or even a fax - but once through the gates, one is made to feel a privileged guest rather than one of the tourist herd. The Castle of Vignanello, near Viterbo, has what is probably the most perfect surviving example of an elaborate Italian Renaissance parterre, planted in 1610 by Ottavia Orsini. Princess Claudia Giada Ruspoli herself takes visitors around this geometrical jewel, discoursing in English, Italian or French on the history and future of the garden, which is to be restored with a grant from the European union.

These days, her visitors are as likely to be locals as foreigners. Gardens and gardening are becoming fashionable once more in the Bel Paese, as a nation of apartment dwellers discovers the therapeutic benefits of a green thought in a green shade. But, says Judith Benrardi, “Italians still believe that gardening is a minor art. They still don’t realise that many of these gardens are as important in their own way as the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo”. It would be nice, she says, if Great Italian Gardens could go some way towards redressing the balance.

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