Revisiting Il Giardino di Josh

Twenty years ago, I left Florence, Italy. Unwittingly leaving behind a garden that today bears my name. It was time to finally return.

In August 2021, cooped up in Brooklyn, hot, restless, the city still in pandemic mode, I received an email from a man named Nicholas Dakin-Elliot. Now that was a name I thought I’d never see again. “Ciao Josh,” he began, “I hope you don’t mind me wrigin, but students, staff and visitors at Vila La Pietra keep asking me, ‘What happened to Josh?” 

Twenty years earlier, I had met Nick at Villa La Pietra, a Renaissance estate owned by New York University in the hills of Florence. As a college sophomore, I had fled heartbreak in New York to study abroad. Nick, a tall skinny Englishman, was the head gardener at Villa la Pietra. He had been looking after the 37 acres of ornate gardens for years, as they went throughvarious stages of disrepair and restoration. He was a gentle man who spoke quietly with the rolling vowels of a Yorkshire accent, and was perpetually trailed by his dog, Flash, a sagacious silver greyhound.  

I had been warned before I left for Italy that it was possible to study abroad in Florence and never once set foot upon the city’s cobblestone streets, exchange a word with a Florentine or, utter a lick of Italian at all. Even at the tender age of 19, I knew it would be foolish to waste this opportunity. So I chose an apartment in the Oltrarno, on the far side of the city, began dancing with a local dance company, tried (unsuccessfully) to date Italian women and volunteered with Nick’s gardening crew, a ragtag bunch of locals including Lorenzone, the big Lorenzo; Lorenzino, the small Lorenzo, and the brothers Molcieni: Gino and Dino. Together we cut through brambles, hauled soil, collected stinging nettles for the kitchen, scythed grass and pruned the boxwood hedges.

At the time I studied there, the gardens of Villa la Pietra were under restoration and were closed to the public and students alike. Working with the gardening crew was not only a way to gain entry into some facet of Italian culture but also my only chance to see the tiered beds with their geometric hedges and the statues, gathering mosses on their pedestal,  collected by the villa’s previous owner, Sir Harold Acton. I’m from the suburbs of Philadelphia. I had never seen anything like this at all. Ever. I was, as so often happens in gardens, enchanted. 

During my second semester, I prevailed upon Nick to allow me to undertake an independent study project on garden design. (I went to Gallatin School of Individualized Study,  a school within NYU, for weirdos where you could design your own major.)  We decided I would redesign a small garden area on the southside of Villa Uliivi, one of the six villas that make up NYU’s property.  As summer turned to autumn, Nick and I worked together to create a garden where students and faculty could gather. I proposed we carve a sort of running landscaped bench at the berm. Sheltered by the villa on one side, a garden wall on the other and trees on the third, the garden was a perfect sanctuary -- more welcoming, perhaps, than the formal gardens elsewhere. I used my rudimentary Microsoft Paint skills to sketch a plan.. That fall, I submitted a final report, none of which was obviously put into practice, and then I left Florence never to return. 

Italy, however,  had cast a spell on me and throughout the years, that time in Florence proved to be a gateway into the world of food and wine --  a world from which, as a cookbook author and restaurant critic, I now make my living.  Even more importantl were the lessons I learned as part of Nick’s crew: that there is no better way (no other way really) to experience a culture than getting down in the dirt and working. I’ve applied this to pretty much everyhing in my life: travel, freindships, love, spirituality. No mud, no lotus.

Over the years the garden grew, as things in the past do, faint. I got married. I had kids. I got divorced. The bloom of my youth faded into a sort of hazy beer-light glow of middle age. In short, life happened.  Which brings me to Nick’s email. 

“That area at the side of Villa Ulivi that formed the base of your Independent Study with me has now long carried your name: “Josh’s Garden”. It appears on all the maps and though its current form has strayed from your final design it has become a popular area of quiet relaxation for the NYU Florence Community. In style, it’s a bit different from the rest of the estate but it stands out as something special....a bit like my memory of you.” 

I have not yet won the lottery or a Pulitzer but I imagine the joy I felt in that bedroom that night was similar. There’s a garden. In Florence. Named after me? What?  I couldn’t stop giggling. I still can’t. It’s so clearly the coolest thing about me, so cool it feels like it’s happened to someone else. I had to get there. It took three years but I finally did. 

Villa La Pietra was much as I remembered it.  Snippets from the past played like bits of long forgotten songs: the smell of Vespa exhaust as I walked up Via Bolognese, the crunch of gravel underfoot, the magical feeling as the gate creaked open. So too came back a raft of other memories. I am not proud of who I was at the time, an outrageous attention-seeking rebel, climbing the castle walls (I have photographic proof) and roughhousing on manicured greens. I wished to distance myself so much from that young man that in the intervening years I have forsook Josh, religiously correcting anyone who dares call me by my deadname with a curt, “It’s Joshua.” 

“Salve!” I turned around to see Nick, wearing a long-sleeved shirt, pants and a hat with a wide brim. It was 99 degrees and, whilst the tourists of Florence wore as little as possible, the gardeners of Florence protected themselves as much as they could. Flash died 10 years ago and had been replaced by Bob, a smaller jet black Italian greyhound. Nick’s hair had, inversely, gone from black to silvery. But the rest remained unchanged. How wonderful it was to see him, how grounding it felt, strangely, and meaningful, to reconnect with him, with this place. 

Nick and I walked along the high path, lined by cypress trees, down a few stairs, through an arbor of flowering violet, to my namesake garden.  Nick explains that quickly after I left, the Garden became colloquially called Il Giardino di Josh or Josh’s Garden. In 2016, when NYU undertook a re-survey of the estate and filed plans with the city, what was informal became enshrined, forever, officially, as Il Giardino di Josh. 

As far as gardens go, mine is small. At the center is a small fountain with four beds geometrically arranged around it. A walking path lines the outer perimeter with intersecting paths leading to the fountain. Stone benches, originally sections of the balustrades surrounding the Isolotto in the legendary Boboli Gardens that were bought by the Acton family in the 20th century and installed in the 21st -- are nestled into flower-laden oleander bushes.

The plantings themselves are exuberant and overflowing. Nick describes them as “romantic.” Loosely symmetrical, two diagonal beds are centered around tall burgundy-leaved summer chocolate plants (Albizia julibrissin). From the opposing pair of quadrants, rise a lush avocado tree (a symptom of climate change since normally Florence is too cold for them.) Around these pinnacle plants, at lower eleveations, bloom the bright blue flowers of the blue leadwood (Ceratostigma plumbaginoides), with their distinct diamond shape leaves, a profusion of lavender from the Canary islands, salvias from Mexico and the small constellations of bright red and orange West Indian Lantana (Lantana camara). Ligularia dentata, or leopard plants, spring from the ground in little flowering towers. I can’t quite remember what my final design had been for the garden but surely it hadn’t been this beautiful. What right did I have to even call it my own? 

It turned out the questions was moot, as it was Nick who dubbed it as such. “What came from your project was the idea that this was different from everything else that is on the property and that that was possible because this garden here at Villa Ulivi is the only bit that's not listed. So we're not under an obligation to keep everything as it always was. And we've made use of that.”

Even more than the deep sense of flattery -- I’d say it’s humbling to have a garden named after you in Florence but it’s really the opposite of humbling -- I was struck by the idea that when I was young I might have been, or offered, something special. Maybe Josh hadn’t been terrible. Maybe he had been special, and maybe that specialness has survived through the humbling and buffetting winds of aging. Yes, there’s a blessing in realizing you're not the main character in life (that comes with age) but when you get to be in your 40s, moments like these are much needed buttresses, like a Hot Wheels recharge or a booster shot.  

The next morning I crossed the valley early to sit in the garden before the brutal Florentine heat descended. The sound of cicadas kept time as the sunlight slanted upon the lavender. The garden is not as I left it; nor am I who I was when I left it. Nick’s words resonated: “We’re not under any obligation to keep everything as it always was.” Twenty-five years, more than half my lifetime, has passed since I first stepped into the garden. Neither of us are the same. We have grown. 

Note: This piece originally appeared in the September print edition of Hemispheres, United’s inflight magazine. That was the final edition. They are pivoting to online content only which is deeply stupid for an inflight magazine, where wifi costs at a minimum $8. Since then United has removed most of the content from the previous 32 years, including this piece. I’ve written — and travelled for — Hemispheres a lot since my friend, the terrific editor Ellen Carpenter, took over in 2017. I’ve interviewed guys like Alice Cooper, John Cena and Jose Andres. I’ve explored Virginia, Australia and the South of France. But I do think getting to return to Florence and to reconnect with Nick was the most meaningful experience I had over the last eight years.