Hi folks, during the winter we have been refurbishing and renovating part of the Mediterranean and Aloe garden at la Mortella. This is an area part on the side and part on top of the cliff, a little off the more used way up the hill, towards the Greek Theatre, that we have been developing in the last 10ish years. When I first visited Ischia in 1997 there was nothing there, only maquis, and a few worn overcrowded paths, and I remember very well Lady Walton telling me she was not sure about what to do in that area, and me suggesting "you could do a Mediterranean garden" - I was an active member of the Mediterranean Plants discussion group on the Internet, then, that's where I met many of you.
Well, in the following years Lady Walton had the Nymphaeum built, that is where her ashes are buried now, and we started to develop that part of the garden together.
However more than ten years later the area needed some reassessing, for two main reasons. One is that the native oaks "lecci" (Quercus ilex) that shade the hill, are dying one after the other thanks to the action of the horrible pest, Cerambix cerdo (a long-horned beetle), and so new areas are coming into full sun, and all proportions are changing.
The other reason is that since 2008, thanks to a donation of Aloes from a collector, followed in 2010 by another donation, we have been planting out what has become probabaly the biggest collection of Aloes in Italy, which together with the huge Agave collection has given a new identity to that part of the hill garden. And these plantings also needed some attention, as they have grown so quick and doubled the size they had when they arrived, so we had to thin out and transplant.
Well, this is the first part of my post;
here you will read the story, and see some pictures, of the Garden of Aloes, and how it begun, in the very words of the donors; in the next days I will add some pictures and discuss some of the plants we introduced and the cultivation methods we are using there.
