The glory of Tuscany’s trees

Italian gardens lie at the root of grand historic gardens in Europe. Their axial planning, their views both through and across their space and their use of statuary, parterre beds and evergreens were fundamental influences on French, then Dutch and English gardens’ style.

During lockdown in 2020 I missed Italy acutely, a loss softened only by discovering that a brilliant Italian researcher in French was also adept at hairdressing and would cut my hair in Oxford in exchange for a glass of neat gin. Unlocked, I did not look like a shaggy man of the woods. I was fit to revisit the Italian trees, landscapes and muddle which are essential to my yearly wellbeing. For the third time since that lockdown, I have been back to the land where almost everything touches off lateral thinking in ways that a high-speed train trip to Birmingham never will.

I return with happy thoughts of green trees. In this age of global travel, almost every type of tree is beset by imported diseases and insects. About 20 years ago there were fears for the future of evergreen cypresses, the trees which make parts of Italy fully Italian to modern eyes. Their columns of green were turning brown and dying back. Spider mites affect them, as planters of columnar cypress find in Texas. Other culprits were active too, threatening to transform Tuscany.

This autumn in Tuscany and Rome I saw nothing but green beauty on columnar cypresses in my sight line. The ancient Romans may not have known our columnar variety of cypress, but they certainly used branches of evergreen cypress at funerals and linked the tree with death. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, one of the concluding songs is described as popular among “spinsters and the knitters in the sun”: it is a song of unrequited love, whose singer wishes, when dead, to be laid “in sad cypress”, a coffin of cypress’s durable wood.

In Tuscany, cypresses belong with the very opposite, images of birth and revelation. In Christian imagery the angel visits Mary, the three Wise Men travel, the newborn Jesus lies in his mother’s lap in a landscape punctuated by cypress trees, like those which still stretch between Florence and San Gimignano. The marriage of Tuscan landscape and the Holy Land is the happiest marriage in art.

Will these cypresses grow in our gardens? In the early 1970s two evergreen Italian cypresses framed the entrance to the walled garden of Nancy Lancaster, the Anglo-American queen of style at Haseley Court in Oxfordshire. They matured, bore cones and smelt of old book paper when their leaves were crushed. Cupressus sempervirens is now advertised by suppliers as hardy down to -20C, but I never see it risked in most of Britain. It hates wind, despite Van Gogh’s paintings of cypresses in Provence being ruffled and bent.

Have any of you succeeded with a columnar cypress in wind-sheltered parts of Berkshire or Suffolk? The wrong way to use it is to plant it in a pot, as it will become far too tall. A better plan is to plant it as a vertical accent against a sunny wall. Could Hampshire marry Tuscany? In open ground it seems unlikely.

For the third time since lockdown, I have been back to the land where almost everything touches off lateral thinking in ways that a high-speed train trip to Birmingham never will

A better bet is that other Italian staple, the holm oak, Quercus ilex. Last winter’s two cold spells turned the holm oak brown in some of its British sites, but by early July it resprouted green leaves just as it did after the longer and colder winter of 1981-82. In Italian gardens it features both as a tall evergreen hedge, clipped up to 20ft high, and as an individual specimen, especially in the informal bosco, or mini-woodland, beside a garden’s main formality.

It is not a choice for cold exposed gardens, but it has been grown in sheltered places in Britain for more than four centuries. I am keeper of a holm oak in my Oxford college’s cloisters that is at least 140 years old. In Virgil’s Aeneid the holm oak is a dark tree, a marker beneath which Aeneas will find a white sow with piglets when he finally lands in Italy. Later in the poem, a holm oak bears a golden bough and marks his route to the impregnable underworld.

In recent years, holm oaks in Britain have been shedding their leaves in spring, smothering the ground with an untidy carpet. The causes are two types of leaf miner whose larvae hatch in spring and eat the evergreen leaves. The way to react is to sweep up the leaves and wait until late May and June. New little green leaves then burst out all over the branches and by July the tree looks shiny and healthy again. By October, next year’s larvae are already laid on the leaves, but their mining does no long-term damage to holm oaks’ vigour.  

In Florence I admired a different type of oak, the cork oak in its botanical garden. In 1545, Grand Duke Cosimo de Medici bought ground for a garden of medicinal herbs from Dominicans whose San Marco convent still stands nearby. The garden is very dry in summer and most tourists miss it, but I enjoy its well-planted pots, the ferns in its fern house and its amazing specimen trees. As a walled garden it is so sheltered from wind that its trees have grown exceptionally straight and tall. I marvelled at a towering Mexican taxodium and a ginkgo tree so high that I could not see its top. I then stopped, stunned, below its cork oak.

It has survived so much: it was planted in 1805, the year when Napoleon was hailed in Milan as king of Italy. Quercus suber is best known as a slow-growing tree on Spanish or north African hillsides, but in Florence its spread and height are stupendous. When peeled, its wrinkly bark is the source of corks for wine bottles, but trees of it are not common in Britain. Like cypress trees, cork oaks will survive in warm sites, especially on neutral soil.

In the Aeneid, Virgil’s nomadic heroine Camilla was strapped by her father to a spear and thrown, while a baby, across a river to escape pursuers. She was fixed to the spear by a wrapping of cork from an oak, surely so that she would float if the spear fell short. Marvelling at the tree’s span, I enjoyed thinking of Camilla, but most of all I enjoyed thinking of Ferdinand.

In his memorable book The Story of Ferdinand, published in 1936, Munro Leaf describes how young Ferdinand, a Spanish bull, loved to sit under a cork oak and smell the flowers of the meadow. Good for you, Ferdinand: visiting bullfighters despaired of peaceful Ferdinand under his cork oak, until suddenly he was stung by a bee. He rampaged in agony and so impressed the bullfighters that they trussed him up in their cart and took him to rage in a bullring. On entering, Ferdinand scented the flowers in the lady spectators’ hats, sat down and refused to fight. The picadors, exasperated, carted him back to his meadow where he sat again beneath the cork oak, smelling the flowers as I would.

Florence’s cork oak could shelter a dozen Ferdinands, with scented hyacinths nearby for them to sniff. Italian trees have a cultural resonance which boring sycamores in Britain lack.  

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