Sandrini has worked for many years with some of the most important nurseries in Italy because this is a country of excellence for plants and flowers, with an absolute variety of native species. Each nursery boasts unique specialties, favoured by tradition, climate, plants and by the essences of the territory where they are located. More than the territory, however, it would be appropriate to talk about “terroir”, as well as for wine.
In these spring days, if you want recharge and regenerate yourself, we, lovers of green, flowers and beauty, recommend you to go on a “Grand Tour of the Flowers”. In Italy there are numerous botanical gardens and parks, garden museums in addition to the parks of the most illustrious villas, a botanical heritage that the whole world envies.
In Pralormo, south-eastern Turin province, a medieval castle and its beautiful park, designed in the XIX century by the landscapist of Savoy Mansions’ Xavier Kurten, hosts the “Messer Tulipano” event dedicated to these bulbs that symbolize Netherlands. More than 90,000 tulips and daffodils decorate the park, the flowerbeds and the estate trails that are still today owned by the Counts Beraudo of Pralormo.
In Tremezzo, in the province of Como, the park of Villa Carlotta intersects the geometry of the Italian garden with the apparent freedom and audacity of the English style. A late baroque villa designed by Giorgio Clerici – but with neoclassical additions by Giovanni Battista Sommariva – is enriched by a citrus pergola and five rows of terraces, in addition to the Giardino Vecchio (the Old Garden) where the hydrangeas dominate the environment and the garden of Princess Carlotta with camellias, the Green Theatre, the Fleece Valley, azaleas, bamboos and arboreal rhododendrons.
In Montagnana, in the province of Modena, the “Garden Museum of the ancient Montagnana di Serramazzoni rose” has selected eight hundred varieties of roses in seven years of patient cultivation. Above a 43-hectares clay soil a luxuriant garden with apple and pear trees and rosehips is a sublime place where to walk as Goethe or Flaubert would do: among the garden of classic roses, the vivarium, the herbarium of senses and the “rediscovered” roses.
In Potenza Picena, in the province of Macerata, there is a timeless place: in the estate of Counts Buonaccorsi, a garden designed in the 18th century, perhaps by Andrea Vici, on the Montesanto hill. Five terraces, from the “secret” garden to the woods, among flowerbeds, hedges characterized by perfect geometries, a pergola where it’s possible to shelter from the sun, fountains and water games, caves, mythological and grotesque statues, terracotta pots with citrus fruits, laurel wings and even an little puppet theatre that make it a real mini court to cheer the noble souls.
In Vitorchiano, in the province of Viterbo, there is the largest collection of Chinese peonies in the world: in 15 hectares more than 200,000 specimens of almost 600 varieties including more than eighty Rockii ones, native to the Tibetan plateaux. Thanks to the visionary dream of an atypical engineer in love with the floriculture – in this case it is important to underline the word “culture” in floriculture – the botanical center Moutan takes its name from “Mu Dan”, the Chinese name of the peony, the rose without thorns.
At the Reggia di Caserta in the gardens of a park born in 1753, the best Italian tradition of the Renaissance garden blends with the “revolution” of the method introduced in Versailles. In Catania succulent plants, palm trees and a typical Sicilian garden were the “jewels” of the botanical garden of the University of Catania, dating back to 1858 on an area of 16 thousand square meters. Founded by the Benedictine monk Francesco Tornabene Roccaforte in the peripheral Borgo area, it offers narrative walks.
Marco Sandrini, Chief Landscape Designer at Sandrini Green Architecture