In the heart of Tuscany, surrounded by vineyards and wildflowers, La Petraia stands on a rocky limestone outcrop, with breathtaking vistas over the smoky-hued layers of the Chianti hills. On the site of an ancient Etruscan settlement, this old Tuscan farmhouse and organic vineyard was formerly a cookery school and restaurant with its own productive plot. When Bridget and Rob Pinchbeck purchased La Petraia in 2015, the garden was functional and charming, but it seemed to lack a coherent design.
The couple had long admired Arne Maynard’s work and, after hearing him give a talk at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival, invited him to visit them in Tuscany. ‘The minute he walked through the gate, he was coming up with ideas,’ recalls Bridget. ‘Arne has a phenomenal capacity to tune into your whole lifestyle and aesthetic, and he has designed a garden for us that feels completely comfortable in its setting.’
La Petraia means Place of Stone in Italian and, for hundreds of years, stone has been painstakingly dug out of the ground all over this region, to make the curving walls that support terraces used for vines, orchards and vegetable gardens. Following this idiom, Arne’s plan was to create a new series of stone terraces descending from the house, spreading out laterally to incorporate several distinct garden areas, including a pool garden, cutting garden, topiary, meadow and woodland areas.
‘I wanted the garden to flow into the landscape,’ says Arne. One of his first decisions was to remove the existing lavender fields on either side of the drive up to the house – which he felt was ‘too much like Provence’ – and replace them with a wildflower meadow. ‘This connects every-thing to the wider landscape and ups the biodiversity,’ he explains. The bejewelled perennial and bulb meadow that Arne envisaged has not quite happened in the way he planned, as 4,000 bulbs, including Tulipa sylvestris and T. clusiana, carefully planted by head gardener Will Smithson, were devoured one night by porcupines. A few narcissus survived, along with the annual wildflowers that are now proliferating, with poppies, vetch, orlaya and echium among the many natives establishing here.
Back in England, around the same time as the garden was starting to take shape in Tuscany, the Pinchbecks were in the process of buying Benton End, Cedric Morris’s former home and garden in Suffolk (which is currently undergoing restoration by the Garden Museum). This gave Arne yet more ideas to incorporate into his design. A mass of Benton irises (see the feature on the national collection of Cedric Morris irises in this issue) was a must, as were the David Austin roses that Bridget adores.
‘Bridget wanted a garden with an English feel – but not an English garden,’ says Arne. ‘I wanted to create something that combined this English sensibility with the unique spirit of the place – somewhere a bit like the Tuscan estate of La Foce, with the same sense of playfulness and opulence. I imagined the design with a few simple ingredients that repeat and repeat, pulling together a garden with many areas and uses, that sits harmoniously as a whole in the extraordinary setting.’
The plan that emerged was rich and multi-layered. Referencing Tuscany’s history of silk production, Arne planted pollarded mulberries to add structure, along with native oaks and field maples, while the green tapestry garden on the middle terrace was laid out in box: its patterns and colours were inspired by the ornate fabrics depicted in paintings by 16th-century Italian artists such as Giovanni Battista Moroni and Bronzino. Below this terrace, less formal topiary in beech and hornbeam blurs the transition to the meadow.
Soon after work began at La Petraia in 2020, the world went into lockdown and Arne was unable to travel to Italy as the design and planting progressed. Fortuitously, the Pinchbecks had employed Will Smithson as their head gardener. Will had worked with Arne at South Wood Farm in Devon, so was able to take the project forward with confidence, overseeing landscaping and planting under Arne’s remote guidance. ‘We have a fantastic working relationship. I believe good gardens can only become magical gardens under a good gardener,’ says Arne.
Most of the work was completed in 2021, but with Will at the helm, the garden already feels as though it is relaxing into itself. On the top terrace, the planting is soft and meadow like, with pale pink Dianthus anatolicus and Rosa ‘Gentle Hermione’ set against the dark ever-green foliage of Pittosporum tobira, and a white froth of self-seeded Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’ all around.
Colours here are light and pastel hued, with a palette featuring the silvers, peaches and pale pinks that Arne thinks work best in the bright sun of a Tuscan summer. The meadow theme is continued in the pool garden and beyond, where the planting takes on the feel of a woodland glade to link the space to the slopes behind.
The most intensive planting is on the middle terrace, with a productive garden at one end and a cutting garden at the other. Bordered back and front by long beds of Benton irises and English roses for cutting, the vegetable garden is made up of a series of well-ordered geometric beds based on the simple layout of a Renaissance garden. From here, you step into the green tapestry garden, where box swirls embrace plantings of aromatic lavender and the wild carrot Daucus carota, while crushed-pumice-stone paths provide the perfect medium for self-seeding nigella, salvias and unusual plants such as Staphisagria requienii. The cutting garden is perhaps the most intensely coloured part of the garden, filled with delphiniums, dahlias and other flowers chosen by the family.
When you walk through the garden at La Petraia, it feels all absorbing. There is so much immersive sensory detail to take in – colours, textures, scents – that you can get entirely lost in it. Until, that is, you come across a natural full stop: a framed view, a gate, or something that suddenly makes you look upwards and outwards again, to the landscape beyond. It is a garden of many intricate elements, yet its repeating motifs and carefully chosen planting schemes give it a sense of coherency and a simplicity that root it firmly in its extraordinary setting and lift it beyond the sum of its parts.
‘We think the result is wonderful,’ says Bridget. ‘Arne has interpreted our thoughts, our lives and our desires, to produce a garden that works with the seasons and the landscape. A garden that works perfectly for us’.
Arne Maynard Garden Design: arnemaynard.com | Poggio di Guardia Wines: poggiodiguardia.com | Will Smithson @solegardener
