The traveller’s backyard

This backyard was designed for a traveller and art enthusiast as a dreamy space in which she could relive the memories of her travels. The result is a cosmopolitan garden, in which the Japanese references of the wooden paths are mixed with the experience of a finnish sauna and suggestions from a mexican desert, creating an exotic dreamy landscape that remains connected to the Neapolitan landscape tradition.

The turning of this house into a b&b required an update to the nature of the open space, in order to make it both highly iconic and more easily manageable.

To minimize the use of water, the soil is covered by a mulch of recycled lava scrap stone which takes the shapes of a small river that runs through the garden. The stone thus transforms into water, according to the Japanese technique of mitate “using something to allude to another”, often used in zen gardens. In doing so, this Neapolitan garden becomes a magical pond, enclosed by citrus trees and crossed by wooden bridges from which to admire the cyclical flowering of irises, calla lilies and agapanthus.

The choice of succulents favored species that could easily integrate into the garden ecosystem, both from an aesthetic and ecological point of view, in order to build an organic and original environment, a magical forest made of magnolias, citrus fruits and succulents. The columnar cacti, euphorbias, agaves and aloes emerge among the green foliage of trees and shrubs and populate the garden beds with their bizarre shapes, like living statues or singular forest creatures.

Japanese references return in the treatment of the border wall which had been ruined by humidity. Instead of eliminating the mold stains, we chose to accept the material transformations induced by water, which give vitality and three-dimensionality to the surface. The wall was in fact covered with a macroporous green plaster which leaves the mosses and lichens the possibility of transforming into molecules, stars, galaxies, as happens in the karesansui of the Ryoanji in Kyoto, where the famous wall of clay boiled in oil encourages new visions and frees the mind from sensible reality.

If you like this project you might want to have a look at this garden!