Ventimiglia, Italy.

Confession: Writing Miss Willmott’s Ghosts during covid meant that everything I knew about Villa Boccanegra at the time came from many, many photos, and long zoom talks with the garden’s keeper Ursula Piacenza and her friend and neighbour Carolyn Hanbury.

On Monday I finally got to visit Ellen’s only extant garden and was relieved to find that I’d (largely) got things right. What I got wrong was just how very, very beautiful Boccanegra is. I also discovered something profound, which I could never have realised from images…

Ellen bought Boccanegra at the back end of 1904, against the advice of friends such as Charles Sprague Sargent who (correctly) believed that a gardener can never adequately serve two masters, let alone three. He pointed out that Ellen already had Warley in England, and Tresserve in France. She really didn’t need to spread herself any thinner with yet another baby.

Other friends recognised her desire to go garden-collecting again. It’s not clear when Ellen met Sir Thomas Hanbury; my money’s on the Hanburys, an old pharmaceutical family, knowing the Willmotts, another old pharmaceutical family, from way back.

Sir Thomas was a big cheese in Ventimiglia, a border town, just on the Italian side of the Riviera. Wherever you go there, you’ll find reminders of him everywhere, in street names, buildings, schools and even a bronze bust in the town centre.

He owned a place about 4km outside, now one of the area’s big tourist attractions – I’ll get onto that another day. He knew Boccanegra’s current owner, MP Giuseppe Biancheri, was up for selling and that Ellen, a frequent visitor to Villa Hanbury, was itching for a Mediterranean place of her own.

This isn’t the place to discuss the ins and outs of Ellen’s tenure – there’s plenty about all that in the book – but it’s worth a quick pictorial spin around the garden, not least because actually being there has taught me so much.

The first thing you need to know about Boccanegra is that it’s on a cliff face. It’s steep. No – not a little bit steep; practically vertical. There are narrow terraces and some frankly scary steps between them…

… you need to be a mountain goat merely to get up and down this garden, let alone work in it. Watering? Forget it.

So the first thing Ellen did was  – at great expense – to install two irrigation tanks so her gardeners wouldn’t spend all day trudging up and down the cliff face. Of course she wasn’t going to allow anything ugly in her new paradise, so these ‘water tanks’ are nothing like what some of us still have in our attics…

The first one was done up to look like a hillside grotto. In Ellen’s day – and until very recently – it was planted up with ferns and trailing plants, virtually hiding the stone work. It’s just been restored so it’s looking a bit naked – Ursula’s next plan is to fill it up with greenery-goodies to create a sheltered, shady pond. She’s already started the aquatic plants that will shelter the surface.

The other ‘tank’ is more like an ornamental pond. Sheltered from the baking sun by trees covered in epiphytes, filled with water lilies and goldfish, surrounded by stones and seats and cherubs and pots, it’s a lovely place to sit.

There’s one other ‘tank’ – much smaller – a little dipping pond for Ellen’s gardeners to sink a welcome watering can as they passed.

Today Ursula uses a network of hosepipes, and who can blame her, but the tanks are all operational, and used.

The plants left over from Ellen’s tenure may be giants but the garden itself is much, much smaller than it was in her day. Don’t get me wrong, it is still massive, of course, containing at least two large olive groves. One suffered a catastrophic fire in the 1940s but olives are resilient and they have resprouted from their original trunks. The other looks almost exactly as it does in Ellen’s photographs.

Ellen had pathways built and gigantic, mature plants installed – each labelled with metal markers almost identical to those at Warley…

…but she wasn’t too bothered about the house, which is, frankly, modest in comparison to the glories outdoors. This is her front door:

Of course, it’s still pretty big:

and was added to by John Tremayne, of Heligan fame, after he bought it from her in 1923. This part, now part of the house, was once Ellen’s kitchens.

As we wandered around, looking at vistas…

…enjoying Ellen’s original plants, now dinosaur-era giants…

…and of course those famous Eucalyptus trees…

…and always accompanied by Fido the dog…

…I began to understand a little more about this most enigmatic woman, the mind behind this extraordinary garden. Right at the very bottom, for example, we could see clearly the mainline railway that gave Ellen so much gyp.

I slowly began to realise something else important, too.

I had always thought Ellen just wanted a ‘different’ garden, away from the extraordinary, 3 acre alpine ravine at Warley and magnificent rock terraces at Tresserve. I was wrong. Ellen was still building rock gardens. It was just that this time, she wasn’t looking at alpine plants, used to clinging to crags in sub-zero temperatures. The plants at Boccanegra still tolerated difficult crag-based conditions, they just grew in powerful heat instead of bone-chilling cold.

This unassuming-looking pile of stones is Ursula’s favourite part of the garden. It is also the bit she has most recently discovered, when she cut back a series of trailers which had completely obscured it.

It is Ellen’s specialist rock garden, waiting to be found for the last 100 years. After clearing the trailers away, Ursula began to notice plants that had lain dormant, also waiting to be freed into the sunshine. They are now coming back to life. It may not look much now, but give it a season or two and a bit more excavation and this is going to be one of the most exciting parts of the garden. Ellen was, through and through, a rock gardener. Not just for alpines, but for all plants that grow in stone.

Alas, even as these amazing terraces are being rediscovered, the climate changes.

There is no doubt that the exceptional – perhaps new-normal – conditions are not being kind to Boccanegra. Brown leaves, dead plants and new diseases plague the Med. Ursula prays for rain.

As luck would have it, the day after our visit, the heavens did open. Here’s hoping for many more opportunities to use the umbrella…

In the meanwhile, there are still beautiful places here at Boccanegra, and long may the Eucalyptus shade its walls…