Step into the Venetian gardens planting hope

We are scrambling through a jungle of tamarisk, blackthorn, docks, mallow, bindweed, clematis, brambles, fig, allium, campion, asparagus, honeysuckle, agapanthus, a cycad, pomegranate and elderflower on the da Mosto family’s island in the Venetian lagoon. 

This unconventional garden, just under an acre, is one of three in Venice helping to evolve an appreciation of gardens with purpose. Each is a microcosm of issues facing Venice, one of the world’s most beautiful and fragile cities. 

This island’s chief gardener — and my unofficial tour guide between the trio of spaces — is Contessa Jane da Mosto, a passionate campaigner and advocate for the lagoon’s future and the environmental scientist who co-founded We Are Here Venice. The non-government organisation aims to restore the health of the lagoon by conserving and rebuilding salt marshes, the natural “sponges” that mitigate fluctuating water levels. 

Da Mosto came to this no-name little island 20 years ago, creating an escape from Venice, the main base for her husband, TV star Francesco, and their four children. Home here is a romantically rustic wooden structure fit for an upmarket Robinson Crusoe. The single large room is crowded with sleeping, cooking and living equipment, from pogo sticks to strimmers.

Drinking water is delivered by fishermen neighbours, and cooking is on a barbecue surrounded by echiums, a present from friends in east London. Blackthorn gives them sloes for the grappa equivalent of sloe gin, and the island’s figs, pomegranates, loquats and exquisitely salty samphire make delicious eating. 

The well-rooted nature-reserve garden, like the other bosky islands here, hangs on to the mud and helps slow stormwater. But planting triumphs have been hard won. After a brief stint as a football pitch, the garden acquired a few plum trees courtesy of da Mosto. These prospered until the drought a couple of years ago made the soil so saline that it killed the plums. 

“I used to make books full of drawings about where the ornamental herb garden should go and so on but so much appears spontaneously that I stopped,” says da Mosto, whose palazzo terrace in Venice is, by contrast, a study in “conventional” gardening with vast terracotta pots of roses, loquats, geraniums and hydrangeas, plus a couple of busts gazing down to the Grand Canal below. 

On the island, Tamarisk has helped preserve the nature reserve’s structure. The scented shrub shores up perimeters around many of the lagoon’s islands and maintains the habitat for a plethora of insects plus shag, egret, ibis, swan and even growing numbers of flamingo that wander around the salty mudflats. 

Reading Gilles Clément’s philosophy of the “Planetary Garden” inspired da Mosto to persevere and work in harmony with nature. But the garden philosopher also fired her enthusiasm for her lagoon mission. “We have to keep a mindset of discovery rather than feeling we can dictate what should happen. We have to develop a collaborative approach to rebuilding resilient wetlands,” says da Mosto, who advocates reuse of dredged sediment to rebuild the salt marsh. The conundrum then is how to get vegetation to regenerate on the sediment. 

To find answers, “We are collaborating with the University of Padua and engineers on the v-i-t-a-l.org initiative,” says da Mosto. “In 2023, we started piloting different ways to promote channel formation of reconstructed wetlands. Seeds and branches arrive spontaneously, while tide and currents will do the rest to help establish diverse plant communities. 

“The lagoon has been abused for 30 years or more and the flood defence is just a sticking plaster,” says da Mosto who, like Francesco, is outspoken about the lagoon’s management. She helped ban behemoth cruiseliners from Venice. “In some respects, the flood defence makes things worse because it stops silt coming into the lagoon, which is needed to bolster the salt marshes, which in turn help protect Venice,” says da Mosto, who laments the lack of policing in the lagoon and her own organisation’s low resources. 

“We have four employees and enough work for many more. Salt marshes are good at carbon sequestration. Companies should consider them as part of their ESG with a sustainability bond of some kind. I care about natural restoration.”

About half an hour away is San Francesco del Deserto island. Da Mosto steers us across the lagoon in her small motorboat, while larger ones speed by, buffeting us as we cling on, balancing on the boat’s narrow gunwales. The wash sends its salty wake across the low, vulnerable mudflats to either side. 

This island remains on the edge, both geographically and in terms of survival. In the 15th century, the monastery was hit by malaria and, in the 19th, Napoleon used it as a gunpowder store. Now it is peaceful. 

Today, Fra Carlo Cavallari is chasing two errant chicks that have escaped from their large penned area under fruit trees in the walled kitchen garden of this 13th-century Franciscan monastery. No foxes here. 

The non-productive, contemplative areas of this four-hectare garden once included some kind of box parterre and who knows what else. The box has gone, victim of box tree caterpillar. Unlike the friary, whose history is recorded in words and exquisite illuminated manuscripts, there are few records about this garden. 

Cavallari, who is the guardian of the community, with responsibility for the friars’ spiritual and practical lives, sweeps his arms wide, indicating the many grass species around the cypress, magnolia grandiflora, pomegranate, mulberry, almond and nectarine trees and explains that, until two years ago, everything around the trees was mown lawn. Now he cuts a few paths but otherwise lets the grasses, and all the creatures living there from beetles to butterflies and moths, run wild. 

“Our spontaneous meadow is like the skin of the Earth. It helps retain moisture from rain and dew as well as contributing to the health of big trees and cypresses that suffered in the past few years. It’s a big challenge . . . but we try!” 

The rambling kitchen garden, with numerous tumbling outbuildings, is another matter. Five friars, including Cavallari, run the space, welcoming the occasional visitor, and novices, two of whom are silently contemplating the garden as we walk. It is a lot of work to create this cornucopia of squashes, courgettes, lemons, borage, basil, artichoke, fennel, salads, peppers, tomatoes, spinach and everything else needed for a delicious Venetian feast — plus dahlias, plumbago, daylilies and roses for the table, and figs for afterwards.

Cavallari never uses chemicals. “God helps me,” he says with a smile, adding: “Saint Francis asked one of his friars to grow flowers, aromatic plants and herbs to make the garden for contemplation and gratitude as well as practical needs. We let some of the vegetables go to seed, which is good for insects and looks beautiful. We use coffee grounds and broken eggshells to deter slugs and snails and try to be respectful of the earth and climate by removing broken glass, plastic and other rubbish from around us. By taking care of our island we take care of the lagoon.” 

We have run out of time. Cavallari sends us off on da Mosto’s boat with a bag of spherical Chiaro di Nizza courgettes, and his blessings to cross the lagoon back to Venice, just as Saint Francis must once have done around 1220 on his 200-mile journey back to Assisi. 

The third garden on this eccentric tour is a 16th-century convent on the Giudecca, opposite Venice’s main island, now a prison for women, Casa di Reclusione Femminile. Unlike the other two gardens, this one can be reached by vaporetto, Venice’s public waterbus. 

Eighty women live in the pale stone building now covered in the prison infrastructure of pipes, bars and security cameras plus, during this year’s art biennale, paintings, poems and a video by various artists and some of the prisoners. 

The guards, in immaculate uniforms and carrying great metal rings of keys, lead us through the prison complex — a glass watchtower perched at one corner — to a walled 1.5-acre kitchen garden. One of our prisoner guides, who looks like one of Bellini’s tragic Madonnas, gazes through a portico with a large window on to the garden and murmurs that this, the only window without bars, gave her a sense of freedom until she realised it was a false freedom. 

We are told that all the women here have committed “serious crimes” but we are not allowed to know more. As part of Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a non-profit that provides education, training and work for those incarcerated across Italy to help them gain employment upon release, some prisoners are permitted to work in the Orto delle Meraviglie — the “Garden of Marvels”, a well-ordered kitchen garden of artichokes, beans, beet, herbs and salads that thrives beyond cherry and fig trees. The produce is sold every Thursday morning outside the prison gates and goes, in a flash, to local nonnas. 

We head through to a quad at the centre of the convent, prisoners looking down from the barred windows above. Yellow landing-pad markings remain in place, a reminder of a recent visit from the Pope. He acknowledged the loneliness, violence and harsh reality of prison life but he encouraged the prisoners not to lose hope. “Don’t close the window please, always look to the horizon, always look to the future with hope. I like to think of hope as an anchor.”

The redemptive and healing power of gardens gives us all hope. Those inmates who have worked in the garden leave with skills as well as hope for their personal futures. Their abundant garden, like Jane da Mosto’s and Fra Carlo Cavallari’s, are practical and spiritual gestures of hope for La Serenissima’s future.

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