Experimental Garden, Rome
Rome: my laboratory garden, between estivation and botanical resilience.
This garden on the outskirts of Rome is my refuge and my open-air laboratory. Being my personal space, I had absolute freedom to experiment without compromise.
Working on a clay-loam soil tending towards neutral, inherently hospitable and with good texture, I introduced a radical constraint: the total absence of irrigation.
I wanted to push plants to their hydric limit, transforming this place into a living research field to observe the true survival strategies of Mediterranean flora.
While experience has confirmed that the supporting structure in the Mediterranean climate is shrub-based, capable of resisting where many herbaceous plants fail, Verbena rigida stood out as a magnificent exception.
This stoloniferous herbaceous plant knew how to colonize the ground gently, insinuating itself between the woody masses of rosemary and emerging on the surface with light and elegant blooms.
It is a continuous dialogue between different forms, demonstrating how even a perennial plant can show an indomitable character and assert itself amidst the monolithicity of the shrubs.
The heart of my research is estivation: the vegetative rest that in the Mediterranean coincides with summer thermal stress.
I study how plants react to drought: some reduce transpiration, others drop their leaves. In this context, I chose rare species that maintain a lush appearance even without water, such as Salvia canariensis, Salvia ‘Vicki Romo’, and Salvia ‘Allen Chickering’.
These are uncommon varieties that have brilliantly passed the summer test, guaranteeing beauty when everything else seems to come to a halt.
Management is an exercise in minimalism: only two pruning interventions a year, in late summer and late winter. There is no chemical weeding; I leverage allelopathy and planting density to naturally inhibit spontaneous plants.
It is a garden that teaches the value of waiting and respect for nature’s rhythms. A model of real and replicable sustainability, born from the direct experience of one who wanted to listen to what happens when you stop going against nature.
