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GARDENS of COTE D'AZUR and TUSCANY
September 16 – 26th, 2006
September 20th, I knew everyone was going to
just love this day…again gardens I had seen earlier and both also on the
2007 tour. Our first visit was to Les Cedres, one of the highlights of the
tour in Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat. Villa Les Cèdres, housing one of the largest
collections of tropical plants in Europe is a private botanical garden and
is famous for its rare collections of tropical and sub-tropical plants. Our
private tour of the gardens and greenhouses was incredible. You can not take
pictures of the home as it is private but my gosh there was so much else to
take pictures of! On 2.5 acres there are over 14,000 species of plants. Peto
designed the waterway in this exceptional garden. Trees are draped with
ephphytes, there is a palm grove, a collection of bamboos and a corner of
equatorial forest. It’s all there, plus more – like the greenhouses full to
the brim. This is a another plantsmans garden.
We then headed to the beautiful Villa Ephrussi where we enjoyed lunch in the
Tea Room which overlooks both the garden and the water before visiting the
gardens. One of the most enchanting of the ‘dream residences in the south of
France’, this is the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild. Similar to the art
collection that brings together works from throughout the ages and the
world, the gardens surrounding the villa evoke both European and exotic
landscapes recapturing the characteristics of Italian and Spanish gardens
that were so dear to the Baroness. In front of the villa, the French garden
spreads out gloriously, but is in sharp contrast with both the
neo-Renaissance architecture of the pink-stucco residence and the splendor
of the Mediterranean greenery. It was on this peninsula that the Baroness
was able to bring together and sing the praises of ‘the loveliness of
Creation, that of the gods and that of Man’. The Villa is set among seven
magnificent themed gardens. Here, strolling visitors will be surprised and
enchanted by the exact symmetry of the formal French garden, the lush
vegetation of the Spanish and Florentine gardens, the fragrant profusion of
the rose garden, the rare trees in the exotic garden, or the archaeological
remains in the Stone garden. Cap Ferrat was the summer resort of Europe and
North America's most elegant and wealthy denizens, and it was in 1905 that
Baroness Ephrussi de Rothschild chose this spot to build her personal
"folly" inspired by the great Renaissance palaces of Venice and Florence. An
historic monument filled with priceless works of art built on the narrowest
part of the Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat promontory, this sumptuous palazzo, one of
the finest listed buildings on the French Riviera, has views over the Bay of
Villefranche on one side and the Bay of Beaulieu on the other.
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