Is La Foce the greatest Italian garden? How this Tuscan estate became a timeless masterpiece – and how to get the look in your yard

For the best part of a year, I worked as a gardener at a private estate in Val d'Orcia, a region of Tuscany that feels much like the land that time forgot. South of Siena, Val d'Orcia is a time-furrowed landscape, with rolling hills and cypress-lined white roads - or strade bianche - the dust of which is hard to escape during the hazy summer days. To the south of the estate, beyond the medieval village of Monticchiello, lay La Foce - one of, if not the, most impressive countryside villas in Italy.

Today, La Foce is a destination that garden revelers and history enthusiasts flock to, but what we find there today is the result of a century-old vision to develop the barren landscape of southern Tuscany. In 1924, British-born writer Iris Origo and her husband, Antonio, fell in love with the estate and embarked on a project that remains captivating. The goal was never just to restore a villa, it was always to bring water, education and jobs to the people living there.

As I worked in the gardens, I often listened to audio recordings of Iris Origo's books, written during the Second World War, when the Origos were helping escaped allied prisoners of war cross enemy lines to find their way home. If you are wondering how to create an Italian garden, La Foce is a masterpiece that cannot be ignored, yet the story that underpins it makes this estate even more extraordinary. Here, Katia Lysy, granddaughter of Iris and Antonio, shares with me some of the stories of La Foce as the family celebrates 100 years of this wild and romantic adventure.

The history of La Foce

'The story of La Foce, as we know it today, began 100 years ago, in 1924,' says Katia Lysy, author and granddaughter of Iris and Antonio Origo. 'In the October of that year, my grandparents, Iris and Antonio Origo, fell in love with the Val d’Orcia in southern Tuscany - a spectacular little-known valley, very wild and bleak, consisting mostly of barren clay hills. They fell in love with La Foce, a large estate with a crumbling fifteenth-century villa.'

While today we might obsess over the impressive estate and gardens, simply creating a Mediterranean garden was never the original intention. Katia continues: 'Iris and Antonio never planned to build just a garden and a home. Their dream - but it would be better to call it an all-encompassing vision - was to transform this lunar landscape of clay hills, le crete, into a rural utopia of fertile farmland, olive groves, wheat fields and vineyards.' In her autobiography, Images and Shadows, Iris says:

“We knew at once that this vast, lonely, uncompromising landscape fascinated and compelled us. To live in the shadow of that mysterious mountain, to arrest the erosion of those steep ridges, to turn this bare clay into wheat fields, to restore the greenness of those mutilated woods – that, we were sure, was the life that we wanted.”

Working in this landscape for a short time, Iris' description of it as both uncompromising and compelling brings back memories for me of gardening in relentless heat, and yet somehow never tiring of it.

The pair wanted to bring prosperity to La Foce through agriculture, along with roads, schools and medical care. 'In their role as landowners, they wanted to make a difference in the lives of others,' Katia says.

But for any of this to happen, the question of irrigation had to be solved. 'The first great drawback at La Foce was the lack of water and the need to use what little there was for farming.'

It took a great deal of entrepreneurial spirit and investment to invoke change here in rural Tuscany. Yet, in just a few decades, they seemingly nursed the land back to life, building roads, schools, medical centers, and - of course - the spectacular garden we find at La Foce. With the help of Cecil Pinsent, the British architect and family friend to the Origos, the gardens took shape from 1926 to 1939.

Iris Origo's autobiography, Images and Shadows, is available to order from Amazon.

Katia Lysy

Katia has worked for Italian television, in publishing, as a journalist and as a literary translator. Since 2010, she has been managing and developing La Foce, her family estate originally purchased by her grandparents Iris and Antonio Origo in 1924. In 2016 she edited an unpublished pre-war diary, A Chill in the Air, by her grandmother Iris Origo.

Key elements of the La Foce gardens

'The grounds at La Foce, in the intentions of Iris Origo and Cecil Pinsent, were to become the ideal ‘humanist’ garden,' says Katia. Humanist gardens reflect Renaissance ideals of human importance and valuing the importance of science and nature. 'The gardens were to celebrate the great flowering of arts and knowledge in Tuscany during the early Renaissance.

'Pinsent became a master of the so-called Anglo-Italian garden with its terraces, balustrades and fountains, box-hedged parterre garden and wisteria pergolas, of which he had designed many in the hills of Florence,' Katia says. 'All of these key elements are present at La Foce, where he was called in immediately by Iris, who added to Pinsent’s love of geometry and architectural greenery a love of flowers and colors.'

One of the most dramatic features at La Foce is the parterre garden, diamond-shaped, pointing out to the lunar landscape of Val d'Orcia beyond, as you can see in the image above. Topiary, as with all Italian gardens, is used to masterful effect at La Foce, and despite its simplicity, is spectacular.

'The formal gardens closest to the villa are laid out in a series of terraces, each enclosed by low box hedges and punctuated with stone balustrades, statues and fountains,' Katia adds. 'The wisteria pergola, running along the upper terrace, is one of the most photographed features of the garden, tumbling over a classical stone walkway and old steps. Beyond this, the structure begins to soften, with cypress-lined paths leading towards the wild gardening sections that open onto the Val d’Orcia’s sweeping vistas.

'La Foce is an organic farm and we do not use chemical pesticides in the gardens. Whenever possible we choose native planting that is drought-tolerant, as water is still a problem in Val d’Orcia, and encourage biodiversity where we can. We do not cut the grass in the upper garden to create wildflower meadows and support the bees in the neighboring farms.'

How to bring Tuscan inspiration into your garden

It would be a fool's game to try to emulate La Foce, for the magic of the place is in the landscape and its history as much as the buildings and the gardens. However, there are ways to apply some of the principles of Italian garden design to your own space.

Creating a sense of order by using neat box parterres and cypress trees as a backdrop instantly makes one think of Tuscany. Try using low hedging, either box or yew, which can line pathways or flowerbeds. Red geraniums are a favorite in many Tuscan villas during the summertime, so opting for simple bedding surrounded by structured green hedging can be transformative.

Framing viewpoints should also be another consideration. Whether it is a simple urn, a large terracotta pot with a fruiting lemon tree, or a wisteria pergola, think about viewpoints from the home and as you enter the garden. Features in the distance will help to draw the eye and make you want to escape into the space.

'Seasonal interest is also very important for us at La Foce,' Katia says. 'The gardens open in March when crocus, anemones and daffodils cover the grassy slopes of the upper garden as the cherry trees are in full blossom.

'In late April, the wisteria pergola is a great attraction and runs all along the upper part of the garden. We love our peonies, tulips, iris and various flowering shrubs that are part of the naturalistic planting design and provide glorious bursts of color, too.

'Yet, in the summer we rely on the drought-tolerant plants of the Mediterranean, including lavender and rosemary, which hum with insect life.'

'It is hard to exaggerate the importance at La Foce of Cecil Pinsent,' Katia says. 'He even had a hand in reshaping the landscape, including the famous cypress-lined winding road in full view of the garden. It was built to connect the farms on newly reclaimed land to the main road. It evokes the landscapes of frescoes by Sienese and Florentine painters of the 14th and 15th centuries, such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Benozzo Gozzoli.'

While you might not be able to reshape the landscape quite in the same way, even small features can help to elevate your garden. For example, growing citrus trees in pots is a must in most Tuscan villas and can be done in any backyard, even thousands of miles from the hills of Val d'Orcia.