Designer Maurizio Usai’s garden in Sardinia comes alive in spring. At the base of the valley, the garden fans and flattens out, allowing the deep woodland garden to flow out into wide meadow planting featuring Watsonia borbonica subsp. ardernei ‘Arderne’s White’, Borago officinalis and bright-red heads of opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) among olives and cypress.
In brief
- What Mediterranean woodland and meadow garden.
- Where Northern Sardinia.
- Size Two-and-a-half acres on a 13-acre property.
- Soil Granitic (naturally acidic), shallow or in pockets among the rocks, and deep, fertile and clayish at the bottom of the valley.
- Climate Mediterranean with temperatures ranging from -2°C in winter to 45oC in summer and very windy. The garden has its own microclimate of around 4oC cooler than its surroundings.
- Hardiness zone USDA 9b.
In the buckling and rolling of the northern Sardinian hills, there’s a hillside fold just deep enough
to provide a moment of contour-driven introspection and relief from the surrounding sun-drenched, laid-bare landscape. It was the perfect spot, in designer Maurizio Usai’s eyes, to make his own garden.
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Maurizio has been designing gardens since 2006 throughout much of Europe, in a wide range of climates. In his own woodland garden, he wanted to play with all of his favourite plants in unapologetic contrast to the surrounds. The garden has no clearly defined boundaries, and continues to grow with the vision of the designer.
Currently, it covers approximately two-and-a-half acres of ground, slowly spreading, like the seasonal stream it directs, outward into the surrounding landscape, with the woodland planting morphing into perennial meadow.
According to Maurizio, his climate is rapidly changing, evolving not only the plants he grows but the natural vegetation too. While summer temperatures once peaked at 37-38oC, last year they reached a top of 48oC with a week of 42-45oC. Despite that, and even because of it, Maurizio doesn’t see why a garden should reflect its stressed surroundings. The earliest gardens in history were, after all, oases, created in deliberate contradiction to a hostile climate.
His design work in other locations would suggest he can ‘do the dry’ as well as anyone, but Maurizio recognises that we long for the verdancy of wetter climes, and can’t see why a garden – if water is available, or can be stored or recycled – can’t provide this green relief.
His own garden is watered, heavily, from two sources: a relatively shallow dam, and a deep bore, allowing an average of 20 cubic metres a day in summer, irrigating both the garden and his attached nursery.
“Everybody says it’s a huge amount of water,” he says, “but if you divide it by the surface of the garden, it’s about one-and- a-half litres per square metre per day. This is nothing, if you think that a regular lawn takes nine litres per square metre.”
Valleys, such as the one Maurizio’s garden is built around, provide a number of unique qualities to a garden. Firstly, they’re like a walled space – closed off to the surrounds – without requiring any construction. If there’s a stream, as there is here, it forms a naturally magnetic centre of interest, gently leading your eyes and ears.
In Maurizio’s garden, paths wind about, roughly following the contours, forever looking inwards and locking visually on to the water, or the simple bridges that cross it. Valley locations also provide the possibility of that curiously compelling experience of catching a glimpse of something remote, located at precisely your level, but across the other side of a deep gulf.
Nowhere is this more evident than at Stourhead in Wiltshire, where a clear view of the Temple of Apollo virtually floats among the trees, on a similar contour from which you view it, but a deep and apparently uncrossable valley lies between you and the focal point. Here, the glimpses are more subtle: an old stone wall subsumed in the native evergreen scrub; a giant granite boulder; or simply a path yet to be explored. But it’s powerful, and a seriously under-celebrated superpower of valley gardens.
Maurizio’s garden is spangled with a collector’s array of peonies, hellebores, rhododendrons, alstroemerias, roses, calla lilies, azaleas, Japanese maples, ferns and foxgloves, magnolias, rare deciduous shrubs, hostas and hydrangeas, but is saved from the visual cacophony that infects collector’s gardens by the omnipresent and visually dominant boulders around which the garden is built, and which puncture the crest of the ancient, eroded surrounding hills.
He reveals a much more disciplined approach to planting than an initial view of this garden would suggest. “The quintessential idea of a relaxing garden is a couple of boulders in the shade, with some moss and ferns,” he says, “so the goal was to find as many ferns as possible to convey this sense of freshness in the conditions.”
The other key plants are the deciduous trees. Although there are several evergreen natives in the garden, all the trees Maurizio has planted – Malus, Prunus, Aesculus, Cercis – are deciduous, providing shade in summer but revealing structure in winter.
“There’s a moment at the end of winter when the garden becomes totally transparent,” he says. “I wanted to have this aspect of total transparency during winter, so you can reveal the mineral structure of the garden. But then you have two moments that are totally spectacular. One with the flowering of the trees, and then, what is pretty unusual for us, the autumn colours.”
Maurizio’s valley garden is a truly a magical place. Having taken the risk of trying to create a world in contradiction to his surroundings, what he’s achieved is totally, and enchantingly, convincing.
Creating a sense of unity
Unity is one of the most important and most underrated of the design principles.
In gardens, this is often provided by the geometry or legible order of the layout, the visual strength of the built form, or perhaps a very limited colour palette. But woodland gardens don’t suit themselves to most of these, and often suffer from their lack.
In Maurizio’s garden, it is the enormous boulders – many the size of a small car – that line the stream, and are strewn about with apparent abandon that provide this unity. Clipped native shrubs reflecting the boulder forms provide further reinforcement. “I coppiced all the existing Myrtus and then reshaped them into domes for two main reasons,” says Maurizio. “One is to echo the shape of the boulders and to provide a sense of unity to the garden, but also to provide a sense of ‘weight’ in the composition. Under our light, a composition that is too fluffy and has no anchor point doesn’t work that well.”
Anchoring, of course, isn’t just a visual requirement. These boulders also provide a kind of temporal ballast to stabilise the seasonality and ephemerality of the woodland planting. They keep you pegged to the eternal as you’re delighted and distracted by the passing show of shrubs, trees, perennials and bulbs.
Useful information:
Find out more about Maurizio Usai’s work at lapietrarossastudio.com