Highlights of the gardens at Ninfa include medieval ruins

Can you name the most romantic garden in the world? I rule out the Garden of Eden as it is not in the world any longer and you might not agree with St Augustine that Adam and Eve enjoyed sexual love among its flowers. I disallow the Perfumed Garden as it is more athletic than romantic and only exists between paper covers. I might have opted for Sissinghurst Castle, home of the Nicolsons and the scene, certainly, of romances in a wonderfully romantic setting. Inevitably its romance is dimmed nowadays by its crowds of visitors.

Are faraway gardens the most romantic? I hesitate over the historic Mogul gardens in the heavenly setting of Kashmir’s Dal Lake. It would be risky, not romantic, to travel to them nowadays in the face of local political uncertainties. Then I remember Ninfa in Italy and wonder how any other site could compete with its setting. It has style and history, too, and there is now a well-founded book about it, Ninfa: The Most Romantic Garden in the World . The author, the garden historian Charles Quest Ritson, is sure that it merits the global prize for romance.

Climbing roses

Ninfa’s garden lies partly among the ruined streets of a medieval Italian township, abandoned in 1381. Rare climbing roses wave their stems from the walls of former churches and a palazzo that dates, like the fine tower of tufa beside its lake, to the turn of the 13th century. The “romance of ruins” is a modern cliché but nowhere is there such a garden among such beautifully ruined buildings or towered town walls. Water is romantic, too, the chill or ripple on a lake or the peaceful glide of a river under a bridge. Ninfa lies south-east of Rome, just before Sermonetta, beside the Via Pedemontana, the Consular Road from Rome to Naples. Its garden depends on the local springs and interposing river, a site fit for water nymphs, as its Italian name implies. The setting is unique in Lazio and its owners have risen to the opportunity with a brilliantly considered garden of trees, shrubs and roses whose petals fall on to the layers of history, lying in peace below.

Since the 1920s, the garden has been the achievement of three generations in the same family, differently talented and uniting several cultures through their personal backgrounds and taste. It has passed down the Caetani family, one of the most ancient and historic in Italy, whose connections with the Papacy go back into the Middle Ages. Even so, it is not Italian in style. Successive Caetani owners married an English bride, an American one and then an English husband, each of whom helped to give the garden a broader scope. It is not typically English and it is not formal Italian. It exploits the genius of a rare Italian place in a sensitive way, developed from an English style of plantsmanship and painterly sensitivity. It owes most to the last Caetani heiress, Lelia, who married the English Catholic gentleman Hubert Howard. She was shy and quiet, a painter as much as a gardener, but Ninfa’s garden was the centre of her life. The book evokes her as well as is possible for those who never knew her: a tall slim “beanpole” with a beautiful voice, clear blue eyes and a way of moving slowly “that suited the long skirts she wore when gardening”. Whatever she and her husband planted was the result of deeply considered choices, informed by her artistic eye. As in her paintings, so in her gardening: her favourite colours were pale ones, pink, blue and white.

Aerial view of Ninfa’s garden

After her death, Ninfa began to be opened to visitors in 1966 and I first saw it in autumn 1987. It was entering a new, uncertain phase in the absence of resident family members and the presence of a foundation, set up by the former owners to guide it on lines true to their artistic vision. Like them, I was impressed by Lauro Marchetti, the discreet curator, who had assumed the task of admitting ever more visitors, fending off the contrary ambitions of surrounding Italian interest groups and maintaining the transient planting in the style of its sensitive owners. I wrote about Ninfa for the FT on my return and nothing I have written since about a garden has attracted more lasting interest from readers. Quest Ritson also saw Ninfa soon afterwards and loved the place so much that he has lectured on it for years, written of it in outline and become an honorary founding member of the International Friends of Ninfa. This group contributes to the garden’s fame and future, guided by Esme Howard, the senior surviving family member who is active on its behalf in England.

Ritson’s book amplifies what has hitherto passed as Ninfa’s garden history and is essential reading for anyone with an interest in great landscape and the ways in which a garden of genius evolves in a family. As usual he refutes uncertain claims. Ninfa was largely ignored and abandoned after 1381 for nearly five centuries but he does not believe that fear of the local malaria was the reason. He considers that it was simply not well fortified or able to be rebuilt to its former scale. He is particularly helpful about the planting that is still so visible, often without labels. Many of the fine roses baffle me but fewer will baffle visitors from now on as Ritson, an expert rosarian, has given many names, from Rose Agrippina to Rose La Follette. It is so good to learn more about what came at what time. I have watched it perplexing garden personalities who have had to walk through it and present it for TV viewers. In future they can read this book.

Ruined buildings and towered town walls

Ritson is always careful to give due credit to those who keep up famous gardens from the past. Nowadays Ninfa is watched by an advisory committee of eight experts but the crucial mind is Marchetti’s, formed in the founder-owners’ methods and aesthetics. He is justly credited here with a crucial role in the Ninfa garden we now see. Acute frosts, nearby forest fires and proposals in 2007 for Rome’s third airport three miles away are some of the hazards he has negotiated so well. He has also planted so much in the right spirit, though he and the five gardeners maintain a strict organic, no-poison regime. I continue to wonder why they do not break with precedent and use harmless glyphosate in their war against ground-elder. If it had existed, surely Lelia would have used it to keep her beloved rock garden clean?

The flowering cherries are superb in early spring. There are roses in late March and a shower of magnolias, followed by blue-flowered paulownias. Already in late October, there are the first of the fine camellias. Ninfa is a fragile paradise, planted in a style that verges deliberately towards an unregulated look. It is romantic but it is also ordered like a series of watercolour images. It is a delight to read Ritson’s judgement that “there can be no doubt that the garden at Ninfa has never looked better than now”.

To buy ‘Ninfa: The Most Romantic Garden in the World’ at a discounted price of £20 plus p&p, call the FT’s ordering service on 0870-429 5884; or go to www.ft.com/bookshop