The Alnwick Poison Garden

Alnwick is the seat of the Dukes of Northumberland, one of the most famous and visited castles in the north of England. The oldest stonework goes back to not long after the Norman Conquest, but of course it has been rebuilt and enlarged many times.

These days the castle itself is a secondary attraction compared to the spectacular gardens, about which there is a story:

In 1995, Jane Percy became the Duchess of Northumberland, a county in northeastern England that stretches to the border with Scotland, after her husband's brother died unexpectedly. With the title came the Alnwick Castle, the traditional seat of the Duke of Northumberland (it also served as the setting for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films). After the family took up residence in the castle, Percy's husband asked her to do something with the gardens, which at the time were a disused commercial forestry boasting nothing more than rows and rows of Christmas trees.

"I think he thought, 'That will keep her quiet, she’ll just plant a few roses and that’ll be it,'" the duchess says. But Percy did more than plant a few roses. In 1996, she hired Jacques Wirtz, a landscape architect who has worked with the Tuileries in Paris and the gardens of the French president's residence, to help reimagine the Alnwick Garden. Today, the gardens encompass 14 acres and attract over 600,000 visitors each year, making them one of North England's most popular tourist attractions.

I have long been fascinated by these stories married couples tell about their relationships, which so often fall into stereotypical patterns. I wonder, where does the stereotyping come in: is it the relationships themselves, or they way we talk about them? Both, I suppose; but which is more important? Do marriages really follow patterns, or is every relationship unique, and we render them commonplace so as to better communicate with others?

Anyway the ambitious duchess was not satisfied with an ordinary garden, and she went out of her way to make hers distinctive. As with the whirlpool fountain.

And especially with the poison garden.

This is a small garden that displays only poisonous plants, some of them very dangerous indeed, like deadly nightshade.

Others are only dangerous if you put a lot of work into refining and concentrating the poison, like the castor bean, from which ricin is made.

What a genius idea, and how pleasing that no busy-body bureaucrat has intervened to put a stop to it. (Yes, laburnum and laurel hedge can both be poisonous.)

In Japan, the Kei Truck Garden Contest

Not sure how this started, but it is now an official event sponsored by the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors. Like bonsai gardens on wheels. Fascinating.

Fall

Villa Borghese

The Villa Borghese in Rome is an art museum in a 17th-century palace, and it is surrounded by 200 acres (80 hectares) of gardens that are now a public park.

The villa was built for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who was the nephew of Pope Paul V and Bernini's main patron. That's him above, as Bernini rendered him.

The architect of the villa was Flaminio Ponzio, but he is said to have worked from sketches by Borghese himself. At the time this was a vineyard at the edge Rome, and Borghese used it as a summer retreat and to house such of his art collection as would not fit into his apartments at the Vatican.

Quite a palace, no? Those Baroque Romans were a bit over the top some times. But what an art collection.

There must be a dozen Berninis, including some very famous ones.

Plus Borghese was one of the big early collectors of Caravaggio, and owned some wonderful works. Directly above is David with the Head of Goliath, with the severed head as a self-portrait. Maybe Scipione Borghese was a lousy priest and a horrible person – I have no idea – but there is absolutely no faulting his artistic taste.

Later Borghese's continued collecting, so the museum has some great 18th-century works including multiple Canova's. They also once had several famous works from ancient Rome that had been dug up on their properties, but Napoleon stole the best ones and they are now in the Louvre.

Outside is the wonderful park and gardens. Directly adjacent to the villa is the remaining formal garden in the style of the 17th century, sometimes called The Garden of Bitter Oranges. John Evelyn visited the estate in 1644 and described it as "an Elysium of delight" with "Fountains of sundry inventions, Groves and small Rivulets of Water."

But other than that small portion around the villa gardens were remade in the early 1800s into the English Romantic style, with lakes and follies and winding paths.

And lots and lots of sculpture.

Which brings me to this image. Over the years some of the oldest and most valuable marbles in the garden were moved to the museum and replaced with copies, and then in the 1990s all the rest were replaced. The originals were just put in storage, until some clever person at the museum figured out this unusual way of displaying the lot of them, a sort of half storage room half exhibit.

Nineteenth-century monument to Goethe, who loved this spot.

More views of the park. The Borghese's had long let the public wander the gardens for most of the year, so it was something of a public park even before 1902 when they sold this estate to the Italian government.

Some of the pines celebrated musically by Respighi.

Today this is a very touristy sort of place, where you can eat Italian ices while touring by bicycle or Segway. But thousands of Romans come here, too. This is one of the models of the great public park, copied all around the world. And deservedly so.

Steve Martino's Desert Gardens

Normally I'm not much of a fan of deserts, but it's been raining here for weeks, and we're under a flash flood watch again today, so these look pretty nice to me now. Many more pictures at the firm's web site.