"It's only a stone quarry", was the comment filled with astonishment and disappointment by Laurence Olivier, his closest friend. In front of that barren gorge surrounded by high walls of volcanic rock, the choice of William and Susana to plant the roots they had decided to put on the island was completely incomprehensible to him.
And to think that they had been looking for the right place for a long time, since they landed in Ischia for the first time, shortly after their wedding in Buenos Aires. William fell in love with Italy since his first trip abroad, when he wasn’t even twenty years old. And he returned there other times, visiting the Amalfi Coast and Capri, to the point of imagining that that light and those landscapes could have been the ideal companions in his life as a composer, in constant need of new motivations and reasons for inspiration. Finally, the meeting with the very young Susana, he already mature, transformed that desire into a real possibility. And shortly after, on their first trip together to Italy, the encounter with Ischia also arrived, as casual as decisive, due to a favorable and decisive tourist offer. And voluntarily definitive. Coup de foudre was with Susana, coup de foudre was, of both, with the island recognized as a safe and welcoming port.
During their long stays, that great emotion only found great confirmation. But it took a few years for the Waltons to find the special place to start building their new life. And, inexplicably to many, they identified it in what had truly been a volcanic stone quarry. A unique place, however. Son of the eruption of Zaro, four centuries before Christ, which remodeled the north-western side of the island, between Lacco and Forio, with dark and compact lava, forming a new hill before entering the sea. When the Walton family saw it, time had made it a monument of rock between sky and sea, wild and indomitable, on which the vegetation was struggling to take root, apart from the Mediterranean scrub. Myrtle above all, which emerged among the trachytic rocks, so much so that the place was known as the “Mortelle”.
Olivier's merciless judgment simply mirrored reality. What could have ever been pulled out of living rock? Among the many fertile and scenic lands that the island offered, the purchase of that stony ground seemed much more than a gamble. For Susana on the contrary, it became a reason for living.
There, in the valley at the foot of the hill, their home was to rise. But the Waltons started with the garden. The task was difficult, in the undisputed realm of the rock. They turned to Russell Page,
(Russell Page (1906-1985) was one of the greatest English landscape architects of the 1900s)
already a famous landscape expert, who did not hesitate a second to accept the request from Sir William. Thus, in 1956, Page arrived in Zaro, on the property that the Waltons had called "La Mortella". To design a garden that would have required all his ability to adapt his choices to the environment. He shared step by step with Susana, who was never just a client, but the true interpreter of the soul of a place whose potential no one else had seen.
Page set up the garden in the valley, where the home of the Walton Family was built. And while William fed on the primeval energy of that place for his works, Susana dedicated her creative strength to it, taking up the challenge of a slow and difficult transformation. Marked by the interventions of Page, who on several occasions, over the span of thirty years, integrated the initial implant, also introducing water, with four spectacular fountains and a stream that ran through the entire valley.
"Why plant one, when you can have three!", Was one of the advice that Page gave to Susana, who was committed from the beginning to populate her garden with an increasingly subtropical, as well as Mediterranean connotation. The apparently inhospitable volcanic gorge turned out to be a fertile and welcoming womb for species of the most varied origins, above and below the Equator. And Sir William, who in those years at the peak of his career and fame was often traveling, wherever he went, successfully provided to his wife new seeds and seedlings. He also sent her two logs of tree ferns in a shoebox from Australia. The ferns grew so luxuriant in Ischia that they gave rise to one of the most valuable collections of the Mortella, with enormous specimens of Cyathea and plantations of Dicksonia, Blechnum, Davallie, Platycerium, Lophosoria quadripinnata. While Woodwardia radicans thrived throughout the valley, now present only in a few wetlands in the interior of the island.
(one of the botanical rarities in Ischia, reported by the botanist Gussone in 1838, grows among the volcanic rocks reaching two meters in height)
Susana's care for the garden was rewarded by the success of the many crops experimented over the years, even the most daring ones. Not far from the house, the collection of Brahea palms, Yucca, Agaves and other succulent plants. And the collections of Magnolias, Hydrangee and the very rare specimens of Cycadaceae. With large patches of Geranium maderense with purple-pink flowers in spring. And the imposing Liriodendron tulipifera with their yellow flowers dominate the garden with their twenty meters, hosting orchids, Tillandsias, ferns and other epiphytes on the trunks. And then the magnificent fragrant blooms of the Brugmansie, which in autumn 2002 conquered the heart of Prince Charles, to the point of asking for one of their plants.
(it was the second time for the Prince of Wales at the Mortella, where he already been in 1991)
And yet the rarities among rarities: the great Gingko biloba, the Spathodea campanulata, which outside its African range resists only in greenhouses, the Chorisia speciosa and the Victoria amazonica water lily.
Researched, planted in the most favorable position, followed one by one in their growth, the plants of the Mortella were all "creatures" of Susana. Both those of the valley garden, while following Page's layout and advice, and above all those of the upper garden, entirely the result of her resourcefulness in conquering the hillside, meter after meter. A project to which she devoted herself tirelessly since 1983, after the death of William, whose ashes are kept on the hill, in William's Rock facing Forio, in full sun.
Going up from the valley of the hill of Zaro, on various levels, different natural landscapes follow one another. From the Aloe garden, a collection of over 150 species, to the Mediterranean Garden, that enhances the native flora of the place; to the Nymphaeum with the statue of Aphrodite and the bas-reliefs of Simon Verity;
(British sculptor born in 1945, he mastered the craft of garden sculpture. His works are in the private collections of the Prince of Wales, Elton John and Lord Rothschild).
from the Temple of the Sun with the collection of Agaves, Furcraee and palm trees to the Waterfall of the Crocodile, surrounded by Agapanthus, with the very rare blue lily of the Nile at risk of extinction; to the Oriental Garden, with Japanese maples and tropical Rhododendrons, the Thai pavilion and the lotus pond.
In 1991 Susana Walton strongly wanted the opening of her creation to the public, consecrated among the most beautiful private gardens in Europe, the most beautiful park in Italy in 2004. The year in which the construction of the Greek Theater on the hill started, to dominate the panorama of Forio. Surrounded by a magnificent forest of holm oaks, with a profusion of Chinese roses and fragrant thyme, the outdoor concert hall was inaugurated in 2006, completing a fifty year life project. Thus the musical "mission" desired by William for the Mortella was linked to that of the gardens created by Susana. That since 2010 has been resting in the Nymphaeum a few steps from William's Rock. Above the hill, from which the green miracle in the stony ground of Zaro can be admired.
