Colour of Etna
Discovering a roadside superbloom in Sicily
While Chris is getting showered, I set off up the road from our room on the vineyard, or vigna, as they’re called in Italian. We drove past it on the way back last night from the restaurant in a nearby village and I need to see it on foot. A scene so full and colourful it could have been Great Dixter, the much loved garden in Kent, except this is a bunch of wildflowers on a roadside verge on the northern slope of Mount Etna. We’re at 578m of the volcano’s total 3,350m, still active it smoulders above us.
My heart beats faster as I approach the spot to find it’s more than a verge, it’s a superbloom of yellow broom and red valerian scattering the black basalt volcanic rock into the distance. I panic as I try to take it all in, snapping photos because time is short, we need to head off soon to our next stop, though my heart wants to stay. To take it all in, to remember this moment. To embed it inside me, informing gardens I create in future.
Huge elderflower trees grow, in mounding shapes reminiscent of supersized asters. Verbascum, euphorbia, poppies, chamomile, hawkbit, reseda; none of these plants are strangers to the UK and yet I haven’t seen them grown like this, as they like to grow in the wild. Dead stems from last year remain standing in places.
And all around, towering over everything, towering over me, is giant fennel, its round balls of yellow, some bright, others fading as they set seed. I’ve seen it growing in UK gardens and here it is, in the wild where it’s happiest, all over the landscape.
I feel the tension in my body float off into the air as though the landscape and the life it holds has released me from something.
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What a wonderful landscape, Jack. And well done for spotting it.
We were in Sicily for the first time back in April, the wild fennel really stood out to me too, it's incredible. In the foothills of the Madonie mountains it grew with abandon in places that otherwise looked rocky and barren.