Blog

Seems like all you have to do to see the outrageously wonderful Michelangelo-designed square on Capitoline Hill in Rome entirely on your own is to get there at 5:30 am. Its intimacy and grandeur in pe ...

Well, I’m off to Italy for a few weeks.  Leaving this afternoon.  In about 30 hours from now, I expect I’ll be sauntering through the Piazza Navona with my group, gelato in hand. Can’t wait. W ...

OK, I’m seriously overthinking this.  I’ve been sitting here for an hour or so on a balcony overlooking an ancient sidestreet in Verona, trying to find an engaging angle on a particular garden th ...

Wandering along the old walls of Lucca this morning I kept passing through thin, vertical bands like curtains of a fresh, sweet scent.  Without conscious effort, my brain was madly googling through o ...

Revelation: water is a far more powerful presence in a garden than I’ve ever recognised before. You don’t need to go to an actual water garden like Villa d’Este to come to this understanding, bu ...

I can’t quite settle, having done Villa Gamberaia an injustice.  Not that I didn’t talk it up, but that I only talked of one small element and ignored the rest.  A few more words, and a few more ...

I’m still not ready to leave Italy, and following a point made in my earlier Italian garden post, I want to indulge in some impressions of Villa Gamberaia, just out of Florence.   There’s been so ...

I’m fresh back from my first trip to Italy.  I can’t remember ever being so infatuated with another country..  But I want to skip over the temptation to write a whole lot of gushing generalities ...