This week's dream: a Renaissance garden in Venice

‘Spirit and nature intertwine’ in the tranquil gardens

(Image credit: Alamy)

If you gaze out across the Venetian Lagoon from the Piazza San Marco, you will see three great domed churches. The most distant of them – Il Redentore – is perhaps the most graceful, says Kate Bolton-Porciatti in The Daily Telegraph, and has been drawing pilgrims to the southern island of Giudecca for centuries. It was designed by the great Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio as a votive offering from the city after the plague of 1575-1577; and since its founding it has been in the care of Capuchin friars, who have also tended the garden that stretches across a hectare of land behind it. Like the church itself, this hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) is a wondrous place of “thanksgiving and renewal”, and this year it has opened to visitors for the first time, following a remarkable three-year restoration.

The garden was conceived in the medieval tradition as an “earthly echo of Eden”, a sacred space where “spirit and nature intertwine”, with walls representing spiritual protection, plants chosen for their symbolic meaning or healing properties, and a geometric layout that was “thought to mirror a divine order”. It’s a vision that you might recognise from the paintings of Venetian masters such as Bellini, where the Virgin is often portrayed before a hortus conclusus, evoking the “perfumed” imagery of the Song of Songs: “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse.” And these ideas have deeply informed the process of restoration, which was overseen by the landscape architect Paolo Pejrone for the Venice Gardens Foundation.

Among the garden’s glories (some reintroduced) are swathes of lavender and helichrysum (the “everlasting flower”), orchards of figs and pomegranates, a medieval herbarium, and a symbolic cross of chestnut pergolas draped in wisteria and roses, with a raised pond (recalling the medieval “fountain of life”) at its centre. Loveliest of all, though, is the “hidden garden” beside the lagoon, where the “dusky scents of mock orange and night-blooming jasmine sweeten the air”.