A rental car in Italy

No filters. Just the fading lights as we walked back from dinner

While the main purpose of our current travels is gardening, it takes time to process what we have seen and the photos – the many photos – are best sorted on my home PC with its big screen. So the gardening content will have to wait. But allow me to tell the tale of renting a car in Italy. And because cars are so dull, I did not bother taking a single photo of our little Peugeot. Instead, I give you the unrelated glory that is the hillside village of Sermoneta.

We could not get to Sermoneta, or indeed to the gardens of Ninfa and La Torrecchia without a car. I said I would drive. Not from Rome. I have seen Rome traffic and I do not have a death wish. The town of Latina looked more manageable and I booked and paid for a car on line, even doing an advance check-in, to save time when it came to collecting the car, the company site told me.

We transferred by trains from Tivoli to Latina Scalo. I say trains, plural, because it took three, though the distance is but short. We have learned how to manage the Italian rail system with some confidence. I bought the tickets for the local bus from the railway station to the centre of Latina, thereby saving what seemed an exorbitant taxi fare.

But pride comes before a fall. Getting onto a local bus is easy. Getting off in the right place is something else entirely. We should have been able to alight a few hundred metres from the car hire company. By the time we actually alighted, we were 3.8 km away. Latina is a charmless 1930s city, built by Mussolini and off the tourist trail. This means no taxis to be seen and very – very, very – little English is spoken. I never criticise that. After all, we do not speak Italian so why should we expect them to understand English? But it can make life challenging.

This IS a road in Sermoneta. Cars went up and down it. But we just parked our car and left it by the city walls.

No taxis, no rescue, the temperature was over 33 degrees Celsius, maybe 35 or more, and we were standing by the road with a trolley case and day pack each. Fortunately we travel fairly lightly. Mark grimly declared the distance of 3.8 km as “do-able”. As in walkable. We had no other options. We trudged the 3.8km in about 35 degrees of heat.

Never have I been so pleased to see a destination as the car hire place. Rarely has my relief been so misplaced.

The hire place was staffed by two men. The senior man was tattooed and utterly disinterested in us. The younger of the two was startlingly good looking and claimed to speak English (trouble was, he did not actually understand English and could not read English) and we could only assume he had just started work there. Not only that, when the gods annointed him as the Adonis of the car hire world, they decided to ensure that he not become conceited by removing any vestige of cerebral capacity. 

Remember, I had a confirmed booking number for an automatic car, pre-paid, pre-approved, level of insurance cover selected, my driver’s licence verified and approved. It should have been a 3 minute task to copy my credit card details, get my signature and hand over the keys. Or so I thought.

It took an hour and twenty minutes to break me. An hour and twenty minutes of me standing at the counter while Adonis sat squinting at the computer screen, brow knitted in puzzlement. Repeatedly, I supplied my documentation, gave our physical address in NZ, my mobile phone number, refused exorbitant additional insurance (they tried to tell us that my pre-paid 70 euros did not include any insurance at all), refusing to authorise them billing all the car charges to my card a second, third and fourth time. At the end of 80 minutes, I cracked and lost my temper. This happens about once a decade. I shouted, I swore.

It worked. About 10 minutes later, I got the car keys. It was not an automatic but I was beyond caring. Adonis wanted me to smile and say that all was fine but I was past playing by his rules. It wasn’t okay at all.

Two days later, when we returned the car, Adonis was waiting. All I wanted was the insurance excess hold lifted from my credit card. He tried to charge me yet again the 70 euro charge I had pre-paid. Of course he did. But I am made of sterner stuff. I did not yield. He did try a weak attempt to make us suffer by refusing to call us a taxi, just handing me the number instead but a kind Italian gentleman helped us out and called the taxi for us.

We are not likely to ever try renting a car in Italy again. But tomorrow we fly to France where a rental car should be waiting for us in Rouen. It could not be worse that Latina. Truly, it could not. Sometimes travel can be difficult.

But look at Sermoneta! And the countryside of Lazio and gardens of Ninfa and La Torrecchia will follow.

Shady broms

Neoregelia

Bilbergia

We are not big on low maintenance gardening here, though I know that many others are. It has always seemed like an oxymoron to me. But as I looked at the bromeliads flowering beneath our stand of rimu trees, it occurred to me that here was a genuinely low maintenance area of the garden. As long as you don’t mind the prickly nature of many of the bromeliads, they are extremely undemanding plants.

About twice a year, I don gloves and home-made lower arm puttees (to stop my skin being shredded) to go through removing fallen debris and dead leaves or dying rosettes from the plants. That is about all the maintenance they need which is pretty astonishing for such an exotic planting.

We are not quite frost-free so we grow most of our bromeliads in the high shade cast by huge trees. Some varieties, particularly the ones with red foliage, lose the colour intensity in shaded conditions. Some just turn green, in fact, but at least they never get frosted. Because we are detailed, mix and match gardeners, we don’t only plant bromeliads. They combine very well with ferns, dendrobium orchids, clivias, begonias, hippeastrums and a host of other choice, shade-loving plants.

Aechmea

Mark’s father planted the first stretch of this sub-tropical woodland area back in the 1950s, when the use of bromeliads as shade plants would not have been common. He was working with very few different types but over the years, as a wider range has become available, we have added variety. Most of what we grow are epiphytic so they don’t have much at all in the way of root systems and they gather all the sustenance they need from the air and rain. The majority of them increase steadily by putting up two new rosettes at a time to replace the main one which, having bloomed, will slowly die. In the right conditions, these are truly self-sustaining plants to grow.

Vriesea

I have to make an admission. Neither Mark nor I have any botanical expertise in bromeliads – though we can claim to have gardening experience with them. Neither of us have ever felt drawn to unravel more of their botany. It is a big and complicated family – close to 3500 different species and goodness only knows how many hybrids from crossing the species. The best known member of the family is the pineapple while at the other end of the spectrum, tillandsias (commonly called Spanish moss) are also bromeliads which seems pretty surprising. In the middle are the ones most of know and grow – the alcantareas, bilbergias, neoregelias, vrieseas and the like. A lot of what we have in the garden will be named hybrids though the names have long gone.

If you are more dedicated to the botany of this family than we are, track down the books written by Andrew Steens which are even more useful in that all his experience is based in this country, not overseas.

Aechmea

A fair number of bromeliads come into flower in winter and their exotica is unmatched by any other plants at this somewhat gloomy time of year. Not only can the colour be startling, so too is the huge range of flower form and texture. Some, like vriesea, can resemble flat two dimensional wax creations and these blooms can last months. Others, like the bilbergias, are more abundant but over much more quickly.

If you are willing to tolerate the prickly foliage, the only other downside to my mind is that many hold water in their centres and that can breed mosquitoes in summer.

That opinion was not shared by a cantankerous garden visitor. Notwithstanding that she had managed to get into the garden without paying, she stood in the middle of the Rimu Avenue, looked around and rudely declared, “I hate bromeliads. They look so fake and artificial.” I just left her to it.

First published in the June issue of New Zealand Gardener and reproduced here with their permission. 

Up, up and away. In search of modern romantic gardens.

We are off today on one of our garden visiting trips. For the first time, I have felt sufficiently unnerved by international events to register our trip on the Safe Travel site run by our government. That is so they know roughly where we are in case of catastrophe.

Overseas readers may not realise that for New Zealanders, almost every overseas flight is long haul. It is only 3 hours to Australia so that doesn’t really count and some of the Pacific Islands are not so far away. Anywhere else, it is basically 12 hours and that only gets us to refuelling stops in preparation for the second leg which is more or less another 12 hours. Unless you want to fly via the Arab states of Dubai, Qatar or UAE in which case it is over 17 hours plus a shorter long-haul leg after that.  Being an economical traveller, I have transited most airports on offer – Los Angeles, Dubai, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Guangzhou. They blur in the memory.

But this trip, I am really glad that we are not booked via the US (might get code-shared with United Airlines!!! Nor do we want the grief of their new visa regs), South Korea (I really like Korean Air but that is altogether too close to the odd gentleman with the bad haircut and despotic tendencies just across the border) and now via the Arab states which are looking altogether too volatile. Our Hong Kong stopovers may be hot, colourful and crowded but they don’t seem anywhere near as threatening.

We are not visiting Italy to see classic gardens of the Villa Cimbrone class this time

Wild flowers at the Palatine are more the style we are looking at these days

We land in Italy and the reason we start there is because I have been told very firmly that if we are interested in romantic gardening, we absolutely must go to Ninfa. I am obeying orders. Ninfa and La Torrecchia nearby are not the classic, formal style that most New Zealanders think of when it comes to Italian gardens. Those are the historic gardens of the rich and powerful and we have seen some of them in the past, and will go and see Villa d’Este because we will be in Tivoli some of the time. Ninfa and La Torrecchia are much more recent creations, renowned for their soft-edged profusion of flowers and foliage set amidst ruins of earlier eras.

Charmed by the villages of France – Giverny in this case. Look at that little bus shelter!

and wooed, so to speak, by the food

Then it is up to Normandie in France, to stay in Rouen and (believe it or not) in the village of Camembert. We were utterly charmed by our visit to Giverny which we tacked on to our last UK trip. Not so much by Monet’s garden itself as by the village, the countryside, wildflowers, the friendliness and the food and wine. That ooh-la-la French style is so unique. Again, we have plans to visit a modern French garden or two rather than keeping to the big budget historical attractions. I am rather hoping for some time admiring wild flowers in the land of Calvados cider and camembert.

The South African meadow was in its first season at Wisley when we visited in 2014

Crossing to the UK, we have a busy eight days planned. Again it is the modern directions that interest us – gardening in sustainable eco-systems, gently guiding nature rather than forcing it into the strait jacket of human expectations. We are really keen to see how some of the plantings we saw in 2009 and 2014 have matured over the intervening years – the Missouri and South African Meadows and Oudolf borders at Wisley for starters. We also plan to get back to Bury Court and Wildside – two of the best private gardens we have seen – but the rest will be new to us. The naturalistic plantings around Olympic Park in London have had five years to mature – we want to see how they look now that time has passed and also to see the recent public plantings around the Barbican and Kings Cross. The time of floral clocks and garish bedding plants has long passed in favour of a whole new genre of softer-edged, lower maintenance public plantings. We want to see some of it.

There may be a lull in posts over the next few weeks but we expect to come back brimming with ideas and enthusiasm.

Bury Court

Wildside

Just a recipe – delicious cheese puffs reputed to be of Brazilian origin

On Radio Live yesterday morning, Tony Murrell and I were having a free range conversation about flowers, foliage, seed heads and ongoing harvesting in what is now early winter when Tony asked me for this recipe for cheese puffs. I had whipped up a batch for an impromptu lunch when he called in on Thursday.
The Brazilian Cheese Puffs
Preheat the oven to 160 or 170,
Put into the bowl of the food processor:
2 eggs
generous 2 cups of tapioca flour
1/2 cup olive oil
1 cup milk
pinch of salt
generous amount of cheese (any cheese or mixture of cheeses) – one cup grated or half a cup packed.
Whizz it up. Pour the batter into muffin pans (makes 12) and bake until they have puffed up and sound hollow. The finished result should be crisp on the outside with a slightly chewy, almost hollow centre.
Notes:
I adapted the recipe from one on the internet but I did not record the source so I can’t credit it.
Nor can I vouch for its authenticity in terms of being Brazilian but they are delicious.
I suspect the critical ingredient is the tapioca flour which neither of my usual supermarkets stock but I find it either at the delicatessen or Asian supermarkets. As far as I know, tapioca flour is gluten free, being cassava-based. In texture and consistency resembles finely milled rice flour or what we know as cornflour.
If you have never worked out the differences between tapioca, sago and semolina and their close relatives of couscous and corn grits, I once unravelled the various base ingredients here.

Mark’s tumbler pigeons and the persimmon tree – entirely unrelated but they fit the colour scheme.

Thoughtful garden media and the (belated) fall from grace of a garden celeb

My latest gardening book purchase has arrived – ‘Natural Selection’ by Dan Pearson. It is a collection of writings again, Pearson’s columns from the Observer over a ten-year span. I thought it would be excellent long-haul reading for we are off again in a fortnight. As New Zealanders, we fly longer and further than any other country in the world that I know of (except maybe Russia?). But it is too heavy to be wanting to cart around the world so I dipped into the month of June. Indulge me while I quote the first paragraph I read:

“The meadows are at their best in June, eclipsing the failing foliage of spring bulbs and fraying the edges of the fields. I’ll mow a path for contrast and ease of access and, for a while, I feel that is all I ever want of a garden. An environment gently steered, but a place that has a will of its own and infinite complexity.”

Not a Pearson garden, but the New Perennials style

I was entranced by the gentle lyricism from this man who is a first-rate plantsperson as well as a leading designer. It is a rare combination but you will have to wait until I have read more for more detail. The author first came to our notice back in 2006 . I say 2006 because that is when we were watching a series that starred him visiting gardens around the world. I see the programmes actually dated back to 1997 (called Dan Pearson: Routes around the World) – there is nothing more likely to make you feel that you are living in an isolated backwater than it taking NINE YEARS for a television series to reach this land. Fortunately, You Tube has dragged us into the modern times and I have got to grips with Chromecast so these days I can screen last week’s BBC Gardeners’ World on our TV. It has taken a little to adjust to the sudden leap forward of several years. Monty and Nigel have both aged a little and Nigel the Dog’s replacement is already on the scene. Longmeadow is looking ever more tightly groomed. But I digress. Back to Dan Pearson. He is a leading practitioner of the New Perennials movement (or naturalistic gardening or a return to the soft-edged romantic garden style – call it what you will). We are genuinely excited that we are able to see some of his work – both private and public – on our trip in a couple of weeks’ time.

Alas, this week saw a fall from our grace for another British gardening celeb. This is old news – but only three years old so the transmission of information is getting faster. Alan Titchmarsh supports UKIP. You could have knocked us down with a feather. And fox-hunting and the politics of envy along with Britain for the British but Scotland must remain united with England no matter what the Scots think. Oh that’s right, and women whinge and of course there is no injustice in the way older women are discriminated against in key presenting roles on television.

I did not need to know all this. I had always nursed some respect and a fondness for Alan Titchmarsh, even forgiving him his somewhat whining voice (ha!) as a television presenter while blenching at some definite aberrations in good taste. The first gardening book I ever read was possibly the first of many (many, many) gardening books he wrote – ‘Avant-Gardening. A guide to one-upmanship in the garden’ (1984). It is still witty and quotable, to the extent that when I saw it for sale in a second hand bookshop on the island of Patmos (where John the Apostle received his revelation) a few years ago, I bought a second copy for a friend. It was a totally wasted gift, as it turned out, but these latest revelations about Titchmarsh make me feel better about that.

It is one thing when a garden celeb like NZ’s Maggie Barry goes into Parliament as an MP for a mainstream party, although she may have lost more fans than she has gained in the time since. UKIP* is something different altogether. When Titchmarsh praised Nigel Farage for “saying what a lot of … politicians are frightened of saying”, he was not only spouting populist cliché. He appears to not comprehend that civilisation is but a thin veneer and some things are best left unsaid.

Why, you may ask, are we so focused on overseas garden media? Alas New Zealand television gardening appears not to have moved on from those awful gimmicky make-overs of the 90s and sponsorship dominates and intrudes on the programme content (here’s looking at you, Tui Products and, to a lesser extent, Yates). As for books, the local market is very small and the number of gardening books published are few. I can’t recall seeing a NZ gardening book worth buying since Lynda Hallianan’s “Back to the Land” five years ago and that was a book of its time, rather than a classic.   Ponder, maybe, about what happened to garden writing in our newspapers. That is one media outlet that could have continued to foster local interest without the costs that come with television and books. But sadly, it is clearly not a priority these days in this country.

For us, the international perspective gives a wider view on the world of gardening that we can not get from NZ sources.

If you like a wry writing style, read Quentin Letts on Alan Titchmarsh and the horror of wooden decking. “He was so outraged by my impertinence — I had attacked a national treasure! — that he invited me on to his afternoon TV chat programme, where I was subjected to a show trial that would not have discredited Maoist China.”

*UKIP – the United Kingdom Independence Party is on the hard right in the mould of Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France. Fortunately, we do not have an equivalent that wields any influence in this country where we are more likely to describe this as fascism and white supremacy.