La Limonaia
The La Pietra gardens are of the most celebrated in Italy. Renaissance revival in style, they reflect the tastes of the large Anglo-American community that lived in Florence at the turn of the nineteenth century. The thirty-seven acres of orderly green are as lush as the Tuscan landscape that surrounds them.
When I spent a year living among it, I relished the time spent wandering the grounds: neatly clipped topiaries, fruit trees maturing in terracotta, light diffusing through the dense olive grove. Olive harvesting was a days-long venture: rakes were used to part the fruit from its branches, and large, fine-mesh nets were used to collect. In spring, trumpeting flower heads declared the arrival of warmer months, which brought sun-scorched tile underfoot and air that smelled like earth.
Yellow Irish yews, cypresses, and oaks shaded the array of vegetables harvested every season. The aromatic culinary garden was of particular inspiration — leafy lettuces and fresh herbs grown under the Mediterranean sun. The most formal garden, located on the east side of the Villa, sloped to a magnificent frame of il Duomo in Florence’s city center. Shaded grottos punctuated the formal garden, their entrances shielded with a curtain of wisteria.
The Limonaia and Orangerie conservatories were among my favorite spaces to occupy in the late afternoons with an espresso, and I have fond memories of dinners held at banquet-length tables within them. In the evenings, citronella lanterns lit all pathways. On August nights, fireflies served to further illuminate the hedges’ edge.
There is an enduring, special quality to a garden that envelops its visitor, regardless of the style in which it is grown.
THE HISTORY
In 1903, after a three month journey through Italy — Umbria, Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany — Hortense L. Mitchell and her husband Arthur M. Acton, painter, collector and interior designer, associate of Stanford White and Stefano Bardini, took up residence at La Pietra, a Renaissance villa, originally built for the humanist Francesco Sassetti, friend of Cosimo de’ Medici.
From 1908 until the outbreak of the Second World War, La Pietra Garden’s design is much influenced by the true Renaissance gardens of Florence although it also contains elements reflecting later gardening fashions. As Harold Acton details in Memoirs of an Aesthete, the garden of an Italian villa constitutes the natural extension of the house: at Villa La Pietra the sequence of rooms in the house and garden is developed on two perpendicular axes and provides unexpected views in all directions, both indoors and out. Such vistas, many formal in composition, others occurring organically, are often made up of combinations of objects of varying age, material, color, form and style which perfectly illustrate the eclectic taste prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
— Francesca Baldry, in Villa La Pietra and the Actons in 1908
