From Tresco to Ventimiglia
For the ever-supportive and ever-hilarious women of TEG
My suitcase was far heavier than it was meant to be. I was punished financially, physically and spiritually. Not getting a larger weight allowance had been a mistake. It was a mistake at Gatwick when the smarmy easyJet self check-in machine fined me, it was a mistake at Nice when I had to wheel my suitcase to the train station and then carry it up two flights of stairs, and it was also quite a mistake when I boarded the train to Italy during rush hour and had to bend awkwardly over it because many bikes had taken up the space and there was really only enough room for me or the suitcase.
Once we had deposited a good number of people across the various sur-Mers, however, I was able for the first time in my life to enjoy a view out onto the sparkling curl of blue otherwise known as the Cote D’Azur. By this point it was golden hour as the train chugged perilously parallel to the brilliant expanse of sea to the right and, to the left, ragged clifftops covered with wild olives, Aleppo pines, cypresses and purple clouds of morning glory (Ipomoea indica, invasive!). I’d never seen light take on such a thick and saturated hue: molten coins flowing across every surface and and causing it all to sparkle with a brilliance I hadn’t thought possible in the realms of real life. It was immediately clear why this landscape had so inspired many main players of the twentieth century painting scene.
The train pulled in to Ventimiglia as night fell. The last time I’d heard from Ursula, my host for the coming weeks, had been a month prior when I advised I might arrive at the station “around 7ish” to a response equating to “see you there”. I had left it till the day before to attempt swapping phone numbers and this too had been a mistake. Luckily, though, I arrived only eleven minutes later than my estimate of four weeks past and, after a tense couple of minutes waiting at the station, a smiling nut-brown lady with a waft of white hair appeared to take me to shelter and safety.
Our lack of communication prior to my arrival meant that we had not discussed dietary requirements or position on canines. It was a relief therefore that I do eat meat and am completely enamoured by dogs, particularly big ones, as we drew up to Villa Boccanegra and were enthusiastically welcomed by Fido, Ursula’s five year old Beauceron who is more wolf than dog, and a home-cooked meal of braised rabbit.
Ursula’s kitchen is astonishingly Italian. On that first night I must not have realised the extent to which it would become home over forthcoming weeks. Not much space remained around the kitchen table as the surrounding walls were occupied to the last inch: against one, a big hob-topped cooker and a traditional cast iron fire stove pushing back an onslaught of olive oils, honey vinegars, salts and spoons; along another, fat cupboards overflowing with pans, trays, mixing bowls, pastas of all shapes and the token box of teabags for occasional English visitors. Two large marble sinks run along another and, hanging above them, a string of utensils, hooks for hand towels, hooks for dish towels, and any wall gaps occupied by framed sketches and watercolours of fruits, vegetables, legumes. I guess Mary Kondo wouldn’t have been keen on the vibe before her radical mindset shift but I was, and now Kondo probably would be too.
In the evenings a cranky radio blares out hits both Italian and English from the other room and Fido alternates between interacting with the humans present, snoring on the floor and waiting by the back door expectantly until someone gets up, throws their head back and cries “uno, due, TRE” before flinging open the door and thus permitting him to race into the night to bark deafeningly at the moon for approximately 30 seconds.
We sat down to our meal of homemade soup and bread, red wine and rabbit legs that we both companionably abandoned knife and fork in favour of hands to consume. It was at this stage that Ursula broke the news we would both depart Boccanegra in the morning: me to spend the week living and working at the nearby Giardini Botanici Hanbury and her to undertake the three hour drive to visit her husband in the hills.
“You’ll have a good time,” Ursula reassured me. “Carolyn is my best friend”– then, softly and triumphantly – “and she is English.” In fact I didn’t need this context as I was already very familiar with the words ‘Carolyn', ‘The Hanbury’ and ‘La Mortola’. In past years the Tresco gardeners have stayed in Carolyn’s home at The Hanbury in the district of La Mortola, helping her with her own garden while exploring the beautiful gardens of the region, including Boccanegra and The Hanbury itself. She had been spoken of very fondly and this botanic garden was very much on my list to explore.
The next morning offered enough time for a walk around what I later realised was only a fraction of Boccanegra. It was just as the Haemanthus were at peak magnificence, bursting through the ground in leafless splendour to erupt in blood red flowerheads with a generous dusting of yellow pollen. The H. coccineus appeared stouter with more open flowers than those of the H. sanguineus growing in a clump nearby. I also admired the blue leaves of an Agave franzosinii so vast and prehistoric looking as to have established a truly dramatic presence.
I noticed that the Amaryllis belladonna seemed a much deeper pink colour than those that had greeted me at Tresco a year before – Ursula thinks they are a hybrid form. These were a mere drop in the ocean of plants to discover and marvel at during my time at Boccanegra.