Why I love Europe’s hidden gardens

03.06.2024 - 12:45 / theguardian.com

Last spring, my wife and I embarked on an extended family holiday through Spain, taking our two young children on a month-long road trip around a country we didn’t know well but quickly came to love, for its ancient walled cities and diverse landscapes, its full-bodied wine and its warm-hearted people.

As a gardener, however, the other great incentive was to tick off some of Spain’s signature gardens – the grand Moorish courtyards of the south and the drought-tolerant Mediterranean plantings of the country’s rugged interior and coast.

These unique horticultural attractions did not disappoint. The Alhambra and Alcázar palaces of Granada and Seville dazzled with their stately palm avenues and brugmansia-draped, water-rilled squares, while terraced gardens in Málaga and Ávila, stocked with native shrubs and wildflowers, positively glowed with contemporary naturalism. The jewel of the entire trip, however, was a stumbled-upon garden at the edge of Salamanca’s old town.

The Huerto de Calixto y Melibea, perched high on Salamanca’s Roman walls, is a rare oasis in the labyrinth of this ancient European city. A mere half-acre in size, this enchanting, semi-concealed garden was intended to be just that – a captivating, spirited sanctuary known to locals but otherwise revealed only to the curious. A little haven behind the tourism thoroughfare. Designed in 1981, in a consciously “romantic” style, it was inspired by the Spanish tragicomic novel La Celestina, which tells of lovers Calisto and Melibea and their fateful rendezvous in a walled garden at night. To me, its coupling of formal elements – structural evergreens and clipped hedging – with loose and sensual planting felt representative of both historic and contemporary Spanish gardens.

We came upon the huerto by accident while ambling away from the city’s thronged Easter parades, following the lighter footfall through a low stone arch at the end of a narrow cobbled street. At once we were in the cool shade of ornamental trees that softened the signature desert yellow sandstone of the “Golden City”: low medlars and dark-leaved oaks, tapering Italianate cypresses, cherries white with abundant blossom and scattered Judas trees flushed pink.

The narrow grit pathways, pleasantly soft underfoot, were edged with velvet-petalled irises and wild alliums and, reaching the boundary wall, we could look back at tree-framed vistas of Salamanca’s two magnificent cathedrals. I may have embellished the unforgettable calm of this garden, washed in clear spring sunlight, in my memory, but its visitors, in happy gatherings below the canopy, seemed utterly relaxed and, as a parent, I felt secure in allowing our then three-year-old freedom to roam.

At the conclusion of a