Anniversary outing!

This weekend, in the brief outbreak of beautiful weather, we visited a beautiful new (to us) tearoom and guest house. Set in a beautiful garden and overlooking the river at St Clements just outside Truro, The Old Vicarage has been recently and beautifully renovated and offers rooms and a Tea Room that opens onto the garden. The menu offers coffees, lunches, cream teas and homemade cakes from 10-5pm every day. 

We had a lovely lunch overlooking the garden with its pond and resident ducks (and ducklings - apparently they'd toddled of to the river for an outing!) and looked down to the river, sadly the tide was out so all there was to see was mud, but it was mud in a lovely setting. 

Then off for a wander around the church yard and along the river taking in the amazing flowers on the way - Perfect! 

The English Idyll

In the midst of our Florentine musings, we decided to take a trip to Gendurgan Garden, a National Trust garden on the Helford River. It was the total opposite to the Italian Renaissance formality that we've been concentrating on recently, with classic English landscape design and naturalistic planting. And at this time of year (although the season is late) it has lovely drifts of spring wild flowers, and fresh green growth everywhere.

Meadows of Candelabra Primulas and Aquilegias...

...magnificent Magnolias and delicate Davidia...

...and even some beautiful Marsh Orchids 

as well as Rhodedendrons, Bluebells, wild Garlic and Brunnera.

And this lovely plant which I can't find in any of my wild flower books, can anyone help me out?

The Iris of Florence

The emblem of Florence is what we know as the Fleur de Lys. But whilst the Fleur de Lys is based historically on a lily flower, the emblem of Florence is derived from the Iris, and if you look at the flower form you can see why. The emblem appears all over Florence, on buildings and municipal plaques and in the art and illuminated scripts.

And due to the late spring there were lots of real Iris's everywhere too, still in full flower and there was even a display in one of the parks for the Annual Iris Festival, showcasing lots of colours and flower variants.

We saw them singly...

...and en masse, all of them beautiful.

What a fabulous way to top a wall!

And here's one from my own garden (note the abundance of water droplets - it'll be raining then!)

Villa Petraia, Sunday's first visit.

Now that I have returned from Florence laden with photographs and ideas, and a bit less at the mercy of  Italian wifi (or was it just hotel wifi?) I can get back to sharing some of the gorgeous things I saw. 
On Sunday we visited another two villas just outside Florence in Castello. The first was La Petraia, a lovely formal garden laid out around a stunning villa owned by the Medici (yes another one!)  The garden consisted of clipped Box hedges and Lemon trees in spectacular pots, but also had more relaxed planting with Alliums, Peonies, and cascading English Roses. 

The English Rose Garden - they smelt heavenly!

Aliums and Peonies

And everywhere little green lizards skittered about, lazing in the sun and climbing through the box hedging.

And as if the fantastic garden wasn't beautiful enough, when we went into the villa there was a covered courtyard which had the odd painting in it and a bit of a chandelier. That's some greenhouse!

The Flowers of Florence

Today was more of an art based day for us here in Florence, looking at paintings, sculpture and architecture. We saw some amazing flower pictures made from inlaid stone at the Opificio della Pietre Dure and the Uffizi Gallery was amazing, but made my feet ache so I thought it would be nice to concentrate on some of the flowers we've seen in Florence so far.

Stunning orange and lemon blossom

Tulip tree in flower

Banksia roses everywhere!

'English' roses

Salvias

Philadelphus

Aquilegia 

Tufty pale Lavender

Perfect Water Lily

Day three - Fiesole

Day three started with a trip to the north of Florence to see three gardens in the hills overlooking the city. The first was Villa la Pietra, which was owned by an English art dealer around 1900. He seems to have bought and sold art, statues, architecture and managed to keep an awful lot of it too. His house and garden is so stuffed with art and statues, that it is a wonder that there are any left elsewhere! He recreated his garden to look like a much older design and the effect is overwhelming!
See pics 1-2 (Just to explain, I can't seem to insert pictures into my text, I shall blame it on Italian wifi and have to add all photos at the end - sorry)

Then onto the altogether nicer Villa Medici (there are a lot of Villa Medici around Florence- they owned a lot!) which had a stunning view and was much smaller terraced garden, with an amazing wall of oranges and lovely roses.
See pics 3-6

Finally, and after a delicious lunch overlooking the city, we visited the Villa le Baize which was just around the corner from the Villa Medici. It had lovely garden rooms and a gorgeous raised rose walk covered in little cream Banksia roses, and lots of bits that would be fantastic to incorporate into my garden (if only I had the climate/space/time!)
See pics 7-10

And everywhere there are lemon trees in pots looking divine!