A Rooftop Garden In Lucca, Italy

I was uploading some new pictures for my Photographers Direct international portfolio today when I came across this one which I took from the Guinigi Tower in Lucca, Italy.

Earlier in the day my wife and our landscaping 'helper', Richard, had been working on her scheme for turning our ten acre hilly property into a park. We've already cleared most of the hillside of bracken, blackberry and gorse and have planted over 800 New Zealand native trees, which thrive.

I couldn't help contrasting our large scale Capability Brown project with the micro garden on the Lucchese rooftop. It's exquisite and one imagines sitting there in the calm of a velvet twilight sipping prosecco, but it must be like living in a window box.

It's all a matter of scale, of course, but I wonder whether microbes that are so small they cannot be seen with a microscope, have gardens? We wouldn't know, would we?

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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