THE first thing you see when you visit the glorious garden at San Giuliano comes as a bit of a surprise. The elegant, wrought-iron gates open up to reveal a massive planting of cacti, yuccas, euphorbias and cycads, with the family chapel behind. Barbs and prickles, fleshy hummocks and leaves well-armed with spikes, spines and bristles—it’s not the sort of welcome one might expect on visiting an ancient Sicilian estate for the first time. The grey-pink walls of the chapel are clothed with thorny purple and orange bougainvilleas. Wild bees flourish inside cracks in the plasterwork. Only when you make your way through the gates and skirt the ferocious army of prickles do you find an extensive lawn, as green as any in England, surrounded by a magnificent collection of exotic trees and shrubs. And then you realise that all those cacti and succulents are only one feature of a large and fascinating garden.
San Giuliano is in south-east Sicily, not far from Siracusa, modern Syracuse, off or fortified farmhouse. The busy agricultural estate of 600 acres has for centuries produced honey and olive oil, but its main emphasis today is on citrus fruit. Fifteen different cultivars are planted in just under 150 acres: sweet-scented oranges, lemons, grapefruits, mandarins and clementines, as well as the Sicilian blood oranges ‘Tarocco’, ‘Moro’ and ‘Sanguinello’ and bitter oranges for the estate’s own marmalade. They flourish in the fertile, volcanic soil—ash from Mount Etna, 30 miles to the north, that has for thousands of years settled over the limestone bedrock. The whole estate is organic, including the ornamental gardens.
