23. Suggestions cosmatesques

Who these days can claim to be perfectly well-balanced? Negative experiences, neurotic working habits and increasingly virtual and fragile human relationships cause our inner balance to swing back and forth like a pendulum. What the landscaper Gertrude Jekyll had to say in the last century is more than ever relevant today: the garden has therapeutic properties, for resting the body and calming the mind. It has become a shelter, a stopover, a place for introspection and renewed creativity, in which life seems like a mosaic that time has fashioned and coloured, ensuring the harmony and beauty of what it has created. With our daily lives still conditioned by the pandemic, the garden has shown itself to be an essential resource.

The idea for this garden was born in front of one of the masterpieces of Italian Romanesque art: the Cosmatesque marble inlay work that has paved the Basilica of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome since the 12th century. The pieces of polychrome marble, arranged in geometric shapes with esoteric meanings, seem to represent a succession of flower borders and suggest a plan for an ideal garden, a place of refuge and contemplation. Here, the garden is laid out in four circular areas around a central ring, like so many petals around a heart. This latter feature is itself divided into three, enabling the pathway to run through all the areas. Each one is demarcated by symmetrical curved flowerbeds characterised by their abundance and fluidity.

To cross this garden’s threshold is to enter a place of safety, where trees, perennials, bulbs and annual plants dispel anxieties and ensure the restorative rest essential to an optimistic vision of the life and world waiting at the exit.

Once again, the garden will keep us safe.

Vincenzo NARDI and Vincenzo TOMASSI, landscape architects, Rosa MONTEBOVI, biologist and landscape architect

 

 

Vincenzo Nardi’s training and career path is evocative of the seasons and the way he designs his gardens, classical yet original, disciplined yet unrestrained, one foot firmly planted in Italian tradition and the other, more lightly, in England... And as is the case with any well-designed garden, the apparently disparate steps finally form a coherent, harmonious whole. Vincenzo started off by studying biology in Rome and went on to work with the Ministry of the Environment on programmes combating desertification and on protection of wetlands in the Mediterranean region. His love of the land and discovery of the English garden tradition led him to take a degree in landscape architecture, enabling him to work for Villa Lante and deepen his knowledge of the history of gardens and plants. Ever curious, and increasingly interested in forms of gardening respectful of local resources and flora, Vincenzo established a nursery in the Roman countryside, dedicated to herbaceous perennials and grasses, which have become one of his gardens’ characteristics. Vincenzo’s career would not be complete without a growing passion – love at first sight, you might say – for the English tradition and its heroes, from gardeners to nurserymen to garden designers. His degree from the London College of Garden Design, obtained in 2018, and his work for Lady Arabella Lennox-Boyd are testimonies to an interest that has become an integral part of his creations. In 2020, he was selected to create a garden in Moscow city centre in the context of the Flower Jam competition (postponed to 2022 due to the pandemic) and in 2021, he created an ephemeral garden in the centre of Nice for the Côte d'Azur Garden Festival.

Landscape architect Vincenzo Tomassi lives and works in Aquino (Frosinone Province) in Lazio. He has always had a love of plants, nature and the noble art of fly fishing. It was at the Liceo Artistico (Arts High School) that he met the Spanish painter Pedro Cano, who passed on his passion for watercolour to him, a passion embodied in his works depicting gardens and landscapes. His experience in the landscape architect Alfio Cavallaro’s studio, where he worked during and after his university studies, was decisive. In 2008, he obtained a degree in landscape architecture from the Sapienza University of Rome. A freelance professional, consultant on landscape planning authorisations to public administrations and consultant for large- and small-scale environmental impact assessments, he has designed numerous gardens, terraces and public parks. Since 2009, he has been working with the architect Noè Marco Sacchetti’s studio in Cassino (Frosinone Province) as a landscape architect.

After obtaining a degree in Biological Sciences at the Sapienza University of Rome, Rosa Montebovi spent thirty years as a secondary school teacher, certain that she could help her pupils (especially the girls) achieve personal independence. She then took a degree in garden and landscape architecture at her old university. She is interested in a variety of art forms, in search of beauty in its many different guises. She likes collecting old handicraft items and restoring small pieces of wooden furniture. She looks for the Fibonacci sequence in natural botanical forms, a mathematical series tied into the golden ratio, in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers; she is fascinated by the fractal shapes present in nature. She is also interested in the arts – painting, literature and theatre in particular – and regards landscape as the world stage on which nature expresses itself. She is especially interested in design of therapeutic gardens and inclusion of disabled people in natural and horticultural settings. She has designed several private gardens as well as spaces intended for public use.