La Mortella is an extraordinary garden we visited on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. It is a wonderland of exotic plants, created in 1958 by Argentinian Susana Walton. Unbelievably sumptuous were the hanging orchids, and the experience was full of other delights such as the biggest lily pads I have ever seen. We were guided by the receptionist (with a talking parrot) to the cafe, where we enjoyed fantastic food and then a concert featuring music written by Susana’s husband, Sir William. The gardens are open from 30 March to 3 November (entry €12) on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Our memory is of music, food and glorious surroundings.David Innes-Wilkin
Kew Gardens Is Undergoing a Big, Steamy Change
22.02.2024 - 00:13 / atlasobscura.com
Just off the Thames in Southwest London, a prehistoric type of South African palm tree has been living for almost two centuries. Growing an inch a year, today it’s the height of a double-decker bus and slopes drunkenly 16 feet to the side. It needs four metal crutches to keep from falling over altogether—for an expat at least 249 years old, not bad.
The tree, an Eastern Cape giant cycad, is kept in the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew—an enormous, Victorian glass greenhouse and steamy Noah’s Ark for endangered species. The giant cycad is surrounded by tropical plants, from a solitary, silver-blue madagascan palm to vines heavy with yams, and rare island species thought extinct in the wild.
But now Kew Gardens is facing a thorny problem. More often these days, the cycad is also surrounded by Will Spoestra and his team of horticulturalists, tinkering with the soil in T-shirts and Wellington boots while engineers set up heat tracing equipment and, far beneath plants and people, contractors drill holes hundreds of meters into the ground.
After so many years, the giant cycad’s home is preparing for a nail-biting renovation, and many of the plants have to be moved—but with ancient organisms, nothing happens quickly.
“They do have to kind of prep them,” says Tara Monday, Kew’s senior spokesperson. “Make them used to being fiddled with.” Spoestra digs down around each plant to consolidate the ball of roots at its base (creatively: it’s “root ball”) for a full year, before the plant can be lifted without damage. “I’m not sure the plants are dead happy about being moved,” Monday adds.
In the slow-motion commotion to come, however, not all plants will be so lucky. Some will be propagated and others, a few bad specimens, chucked out all together.
The Eastern Cape giant cycad needn’t worry—it is a Palm House centerpiece and doesn’t need fiddling. With a root ball five by five feet, the giant cycad is, in fact, the largest potted plant in the world, gardeners say, and the oldest. It’s been in a pot since it arrived from South Africa by boat in 1775, when what are now the Royal Botanic Gardens were the much smaller private amusement of Princess Augusta. The history and age of the building are part of the problem today.
The cycad arrived at the cusp of a craze for tropical plants in royal European gardens. First, it was stored in a lean-to heated by an open fire with less than a dozen other palm species. Soon—via consuls, colonizers, and a lively market for biopiracy—10 different greenhouses were overflowing across the gardens. From places like Venezuela and Australia, plants arrived faster than they could be kept alive. By the 1840s, the number of orchid species had blossomed over a hundred, only to
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