In a thousand years archaeologists will be scratching their heads out in the campo of a northeastern corner of Mallorca. Under a pine-clad sugarloaf hill, behind which the plump harvest moon rises, sits a sloping site elegantly belted in a sinuous waist-high dry-stone wall whose curves are as fluid as a Matisse cut-out.
Will anyone ever be able to guess that this place, subtly separate from its agrarian carob, almond and olive-tree surroundings, was neither a sacred burial site nor some super-chic sheep enclosure but... a garden? A garden that was an enigma and something of a miracle even to its 21st-century custodian, Luciano Giubbilei, who simply calls it the Field.
So how did this Italian-born, London-based, world-travelling landscape designer end up at the end of a bumpy Mallorquin track, miles from any house, framing a majestic olive tree with a mountain of locally hewn stone? The Field is the glorious culmination of Luciano’s romantic spirit and gift for harnessing serendipity. During the pandemic Luciano and his girlfriend, Olivia, were based at Potter’s House in Son Servera; therein lies a separate tale of how good things come to those with an open heart. Luciano was explaining to someone in the village that he was vaguely looking for a field to rent on the Balearic island, ‘somewhere to plant flowers and make a kind of a garden place for me’. There and then they wound up the hills to an area Luciano had often walked in with an artist friend. ‘Have a wander round, tell me which bit you like. We have the land and we have water.’
Enhanced by an incredible olive tree, the perfect three-acre parcel with amazing birdsong was loosely imagined into the garden you see today. It has sprung from instinct and a series of collaborations. The first was with a stonemason: the late Manolo Fuentes, a plasterer freed up by lockdown to transform seven lorries of stone into Goldsworthian curves shaped by the contours, the trees and Luciano. He helped create a terrace at the top with a shelter over a long table for languorous lunches and suppers. The second, on-going collaboration is with the gardener Artur Serra Costa. When post-Covid reality loomed and Luciano resumed his peripatetic life he realised his project needed someone full time. Artur was poised to take a job in Japan, until he realised that the Field’s sensibility seems as close to any Japanese garden as you could conjure on a dry rocky European hillside, which bakes in summer so fiercely that the perennially barefoot Artur is forced to put on shoes. It was a strange twist of fate. Now the two men have got to the stage where they almost finish each other’s sentences. They speak in harmonious horticultural stereo as the garden’s apparent simplicity develops like complex food flavours into this much-pondered, multilayered space.
The working monastic garden springs to mind at the Field, a curvilinear cloister but without plants to harvest; instead they act as food and medicine for the soul of anyone open to noticing them. For despite its unusual walls the garden is shrouded in a kind of invisibility cloak. Having watched chatty walkers go by without a hint of stopping to notice the artful toil, you realise how painstakingly the Field has been integrated into the surrounding landscape. Judicious mirroring of planting within and without the walls, and the inclusion of species that seem to be spontaneous inhabitants of this corner of Mallorca, mean that it is disguised by its own artistry. This is a rare garden where the ‘owner’ has melted into the background; it is a place that revolves around the workings of the plants themselves – like an extension of Derek Jarman’s ethos at Prospect Cottage, but without the cottage.
This desire to garden with a light touch here is not at the expense of an underlying subtle exoticism. The agaves give a spiky significance and structure that look spontaneous in this Spanish landscape, while the campanula-like endemic from Crete, Petromarula pinnata, adds a rare blue note. Delicate white-flowered Moroccan broom, Retama monosperma, transmits its spicy scent in winter; the resinous aroma of Cistus ladanifer wafts like the smoke from a church thurifer whenever the sun heats up; and Salvia mellifera drifts past the nose like a pot of warm honey. In this garden of layers scent is another that meanders with you.
Plants are added in generous numbers in a bid to accelerate a sense of wildness, with an air of ephemerality favoured over the bold. Mediterranean natives are joined by sympathetic foreign stalwarts: soft grasses like the African thatching grass, Hyparrhenia hirta; or Muhlenbergia dubia, which makes long-spined sea urchin domes underpin a broad brush of salvias and verbenas; teeny seashore V. litoralis is preferred to more prominent forms. Self-seeders are encouraged with an eye kept on crafty sprigs. The scallop-leaved mullein, Verbascum sinuatum, is a superstar to Luciano, less welcome to Artur. They have had to temper the exuberance of wild carrot and catananche, planted by the hundred, seeding by the thousand. Last summer was spent admiring the beauty of a plantago that popped itself by the entrance gate.
The Field is a place of constant experimentation and inspiration, with bulbs now being added into the tapestry of perennials and shrubs. There have been very few disappointments: 200 Drimia maritima so far yielded only a dozen sea squills, but they are probably working their way deep into the rock that only a hori hori can comfortably penetrate. This spring the earth under the olive erupted in a sea of Iris reticulata, planted the day I was there. All the while, people were riding past unaware that one of the great horticultural collaborations of our day was happening right under their noses.
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