Giardini Botanici di Villa Taranto

On the Castagnola promontory between Pallanza and the open water of Lake Maggiore, Villa Taranto is a botanical garden built to a single man's plan: roughly twenty hectares of terraces, avenues and water gardens assembled species by species by a Scottish captain who spent three decades perfecting it.

Why it matters

Villa Taranto is not a survivors' garden that grew by accident; it is a designed botanical collection in which every avenue and terrace was laid out by one owner with a collector's patience. Captain Neil Boyd McEacharn bought the property in 1931 and worked until his death in 1964 to turn it into a garden of international standing, introducing species from across the temperate world. McEacharn's estate was donated to the Italian state in 1962 for cultural, scientific and educational purposes in botany.

What to notice

The garden's features include the Viale delle Conifere, terraced beds, fountains such as the Fontana dei Putti, a dahlia labyrinth, the Victoria greenhouse and ponds of lotus and water lilies. An octagonal chapel built after McEacharn's death holds his tomb in Baveno granite, beneath stained-glass windows depicting flowers.

Context and history

McEacharn, son of a wealthy shipping family, found the property through a sale notice in The Times and bought the 1870 villa called La Crocetta in 1931. He renamed it Villa Taranto in honour of an ancestor, Étienne Jacques Joseph Alexandre Macdonald, whom Napoleon had made Duke of Taranto. With gardener Henry Cocker, engaged in 1934, he reshaped the grounds into terraces and avenues suited to exotic conifers, magnolias, rhododendrons and herbaceous collections. The garden opened to the public in 1952, and in 1962 McEacharn donated the estate to the Italian state on condition it serve cultural, scientific and educational purposes in botany; he retained life use and died in 1964. The foundation created in his name inherited responsibility for the gardens. The villa building houses the Prefecture. A tornado in 2012 destroyed roughly 300 plants, and the garden reopened the following spring after replanting.