isiting Giudecca on my Venice trip in 2002
I discovered the Garden of Eden. Well, it was actually the entrance (see left) to a garden once owned by an Englishman called Eden and the greenery visible over the walls made it look like an unusual verdant refuge in a city which has very few open spaces that are not paved. When I later came across a tasteful book in Hatchards bookshop in London called A Garden in Venice (Frances Lincoln 2003) I didn't immediately make a connection, and the name of the author, Frederick Eden, struck no chords either. It turns out that this book is a facsimile celebrating the centenary of a book originally published in 1903 by the creator of this garden, who was famed gardener Gertrude Jekyll's brother-in-law and Sir Anthony Eden's great uncle.

The book itself might best be described as quaint, with many pseudo-medieval woodcuts beginning and ending each chapter, and quite a few fuzzy and dark old photographs of the garden. (I've scanned examples of both for this page.) It begins with the words The garden in Venice whose story I would tell was once a bank of mud. Unconscious of its sweet destiny ... and so on, in similar fashion, it discusses things like pergolas, boat trips, the acquisition of cows, and how nothing is every truly square in Venice.



 

The 2003 edition, however, also has a 'Postface' written by Marie-Thérèse Weal which tells us the history of the garden, of it's famous visitors, and what they wrote about it.

Eden and his wife Caroline bought the artichoke garden on the, then semi-rural, island of Giudecca in 1884. They transformed the six acres into an English-style paradise, complete with roaming cattle and rose trellises. It's tempting to think of Gertrude Jekyll helping out her elder sister, but Jekyll's fascination with gardening did not, it seems, develop until years after the creation of the Eden's garden. It was then, and remains, the largest private garden in Venice (although its exact size is the subject of argument).

The garden attracted visitors like Proust, Rilke and Henry James in it's turn-of-the-century heyday. Gabriele d'Annunzio has an episode set in the garden in his novel Il fuoco. Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, author of The desire and pursuit of the whole (and something of a thorn for the ex-pat society of the time which gathered in the garden) even offered his services to the Edens as poultry manager during a period of skintness. Jean Cocteau wrote a poem called Souvenir d'un soir d'automne au jardin Eaden, after an argument between his companion on his trip to Venice and a young American in the garden lead to the friend's shooting himself on the steps of the Salute. In the wake of Cocteau's visit the garden evidently became a renowned gay pick-up spot between the wars.

Frederick Eden died in 1916, Caroline lived on until 1928. The garden was sold to Lord James Horlick, founder of the famed Horlick’s Malted Milk Company. It later passed through the hands of Princess Aspasia of Greece and thence to her daughter Alexandra, who became the Queen of Yugoslavia. Alexandra wrote in her memoirs of the depredations of the fifty anti-aircraft gunners who occupied the place during the Second World War, but the damage was soon repaired, the shell cases removed and new trees planted; and Alexandra lived there until her death in 1974. Having been abandoned by the King she got something of a reputation as a mad woman and the garden got one for being cursed during this time.

From 1979 until his death in February 2000 the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser lived in the place and let it run to romantic ruin. Strangely he claimed until the last that, despite rumours of his paying more than a billion for it, he never actually owned the place. Since then the garden has been a locked mystery, with the name Gruener Janura, the German company that runs Hundertwasser's estate, on a label on the bell push.

A few years ago an article appeared in the gardening magazine Hortus (no 67 - Autumn 2003) by John Hall, who had actually managed to get inside the garden and reports that, unsurprisingly, of Eden's high-upkeep original structures little remains. He paints a picture of neglected paved courtyards, dilapidated pergolas and fallen statues that does nothing to lessen the mystery and romance.

Some recent rumours said that it had been acquired by both a Japanese Corporation and a Swiss Corporation; but it seems it's still owned by 'people' from Vienna and regularly visited by just their gardener. The Giardino Edino was classed as a monumento nazionale as far back as 1945 and so let's hope we get to see inside it one day.

We do now have Google Earth, though, and so in the image below you can see the extent of the place (bottom right) with the church of the Redentore (top left) included so that you can place it.