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I fell in love with Etruria one chilly evening in January. They were having a New Year's Eve festival in a little town near Campagnano, and a group of local boys dressed in Renaissance costumes were marching in a torchlight parade down the main street. As I stood there in the cold watching the flames lurching to the sky, I realized that I felt very much at home in this ancient place. If ever we should decide to move to the country, this was the kind of place I would choose. of unpromising land in Lazio, the area north of Rome that was home to the ancient Etruscans, built a house and, more importantly, grew a wonderful garden. incomprehension from the local inhabitants. Why do you want to have a garden here? they were asked. There's no water, the ground is all stones, it's too cold in winter and too hot in summer, it never rains, it rains too much, the roads are impassable, the ravines are bottomless... But Joan and Robert's enthusiasm for the land, their ignorance of the obstacles that faced them, their downright obstinacy, the unexpected friends who helped them - all served to conquer the intransigent landscape.… (more)
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Their daughter had thumbs so black that when my father named an orchid after
Then about 9 years ago I moved to Australia and a substantially different climate than my SW Florida home. We have seasons here, and richer soil; maybe it was just my own maturity. Suddenly I wasn't doing so badly with living things; I could grow a fair few veggies in pots at our rental home and when we bought a house and started a proper garden, I started having more successes than I had failures.
All of this rambling is to say that while I'm certainly not what I'd call a "Gardener", it's definitely one of my interests and I'm enjoying learning more each season so when I saw this book at the FOTL sale, I snapped it up. I enjoyed A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun and this looked to be similar but with a gardening focus - just the thing to peak my interest.
There are people out there that are just interesting to talk to - not necessarily riveting, but they hold your attention and offer a pleasant way to pass the time. Notes from an Italian Garden offers the same. I looked forward to picking it up and I lost myself enough to regret putting it down. The author and I share an interest in growing unusual plants, heirlooms, food, and occasionally plants that aren't really meant to be grown where we live. (At last count, I'm up to 23 different varieties of fruit - 3 of which I'm definitely not supposed to be able to grow here in Melbourne.) That shared interest kept me more glued to the book than I otherwise might have been.
The only downside of the book: it has done nothing to discourage my fantasy of chucking it all and moving to a sunny part of Europe.