Vignamaggio’s garden was created in the late ’20es by Elena and Bino Sanminiatelli. The couple wished to connect the villa to the forest, enclosing the building within a natural frame, according to the principles of a typical renaissance garden, which took the place of the fruit orchards and wheat that were there before.
In 2014, under the guide of architect Patrice Taravella, who already created the Prieuré d’Orsan and Babylonstoren’s gardens, garden renovations began with the refurbishment of the old arched pergola and the two fountains.
For Patrice, Tuscany is a garden created by its farmers, who came up with creative practical solutions to farming challenges: stone walled terraces, rows of cypresses, rosemary bushes, olive groves in straight lines and vineyards all paint a harmonious rectilinear landscape carpeting the hills.
Within these lines there are thousands of characterful details: stone wells, statuettes of the Madonna at the intersections of country lanes, deep stone drainage chutes and chestnut groves. Over the years, the harmony in this landscape has undergone profound changes as fields and meadows, fruit orchards and vegetable gardens were replaced with large expanses of mechanisable vineyards, even on the least accessible land, destroying all the beauty developed over the centuries.
The aim of Vignamaggio garden’s project will be to create a new landscape from the biodiversity plan, a large mosaic of the new crops and livestock, unifiying the concept of formal garden and vegetable garden.
The next phase, in fact, saw the expansion of the garden with the inclusion of a large terraced vegetable garden providing produce to embellish the estate’s tables. The citrus orchard was also added and contains the same unique and perfumed collection painted by Bartolomeo Bimbi, humble tribute to that of the Medicis.
