Nature and Order

When you enter Luciano Giubbilei’s west London studio, the first thing you see is a pair of silt and mud works by the Mallorcan artist Guillem Nadal. Framed and hung on white walls, they are a reminder of raw earth in this airy, high ceilinged space. Nadal makes his paintings by dragging his fingers through the malleable surface, generating shapes which are simultaneously organic and architectural. It is in this zone – this split-space between nature and order – that Giubbilei lives and works.

“Tuning,” he calls it, as we sit down to talk in the studio library. I had forgotten that quality of English light; a palette of greys which shifts and fades, catching on the translucent paper as Giubbilei arranges his sketches on a drawing board. “When I begin the process of designing a garden, I spend a considerable amount of time on-site, waiting to see what form the space will take, and what connections will rise. It’s very instinctive, a bit like when you meet someone for the first time. All you need is one gesture, one element of movement or pattern, and that gesture comes to define the whole garden.”

Giubillei is known for his rigorous yet poetic aesthetic, applying the classical proportions of Italian formal gardens to generate sonnet-like structures of repetition and variation. These are gardens characterised by a gestural frugality and confidence of vision; the result is a series of stages upon which light might play. He is, in many ways, an establishment figure. His gardens for Laurent-Perrier at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show won him a gold medal and Best in Show, and he has designed private gardens from Kensington to Dallas. Yet there is something rebellious in his approach to his craft – less a rebellion of defiance or radicalism, than the quiet resistance of underlying melancholy. Talking to him, one senses both a profound humility and a deep inner world.

Were Giubblei’s aesthetic to be placed in context, one might look to the layered and sculpted topiaries of the Belgian garden designer Jacques Wirtz, and the attention to form and texture in the work of Dutch designer Piet Oudolf. One might also look to the ecstatic geometry of landscape architect Dan Kiley, whose gardens brought a sense of mathematical order in the wake of the Second World War. However, Giubbilei is perhaps best understood in relation to the artists with whom he collaborates. On the wall is a wooden Eclipse by sculptor Nigel Hall, and a photograph of minimalist artist Lee Ufan rests on a shelf next to clay vessels by the late Maria Antònia Carrió. The ceramicist’s former home and studio in Mallorca came to represent of one of Giubbilei’s primary values, artistic dialogue, and he is in the process of renovating the house and garden for a new residency programme to be launched this year.

“Dialogue is essential to me as a way to keep looking and thinking,” Giubbilei explains. “You can draw up your own rules, but you need some push-back. A huge part of my process comes about through dialogue with artists, mentors, and clients. And, of course, there is the dialogue with the land itself.” He shows me a hand-drawn plan of perennial planting, coloured pencil indicating purple salvias nested amongst silvery stachys and white verbascum. “These drawings are made as an attempt to show what the garden might become – they are not the garden itself. The composition of the plants might stay the same, but the groups will adapt and expand.”

He points to the precise dividing lines separating swathes of purple and yellow pencil. “When we get to the ground, we’ll need to pull those lines closer together to create adequate density – we might discover we need twice the number of plants we planned for. The process is constantly being tested as we interact with the physical space, and that can be daunting.” He shrugs, putting the sketch aside. “The artist Ursula Von Rydingsvard once told me that the only way to make is with your hands. She taught me to see the similarities between garden design and sculpture: you might take countless research photographs, make sketches, and have different abstract ideas, but, ultimately, you have to work from the ground up, piece by piece. You make with the materials, and they respond to you by gradually taking form.”

I examine the photographs and magazine cuttings pinned to the wall; a mood board for an ongoing project in Val d'Orcia, Tuscany. “Typically when we embark on a project, we’ll be working with an end in sight – to succeed would be to reach some point of arrival. But I don’t know if such an arrival exists. A garden is always the beginning of something new.” He shows me images of the Tuscan garden, shrouded in mist. “This garden is different. Over the last four years, we’ve had the chance to return, allowing the planting to evolve with each passing season. It’s wonderful to be able to sustain a long-term relationship with a site – there are decisions that need to be reassessed, and moments of serendipity as plants seed to different areas.”

“My first ever garden was in Tuscany. When I was in my late teens I met an English girl and we rented an apartment with a garden looking onto the Casentino Mountains – I had a vegetable plot where I grew artichokes, courgettes, pumpkins, and a few herbs. It’s almost as though the garden in Val d’Orcia mirrors the different stages of my practice from that point on. First, you have a courtyard in the style of the green gardens I made in the early part of my career – a still space without flowers, shaped by a high, hornbeam hedge and topiary drums. Then, you reach a progression of scented plants and textured shrubs in the Mediterranean garden. Here, I think the planting reflects the turning point I experienced in 2015, when I broke away from the green gardens and had the chance to work on an experimental bed at Great Dixter in Sussex. And now, just four weeks ago, we returned to Val d’Orcia to work on the vegetable garden, planting bulbs for the spring. It was as though I was back to where everything started.”

Giubbilei tells me about that first garden – how he used to set the table under the fig tree, and how the sun came out from behind the mountains, catching on the ramparts of the Castello di Brolio. “I grew up in my grandmother’s house in Siena, so that was the first time I had lived in the countryside. My grandmother never had a garden, but she gave me an appreciation for a type of simplicity and grace. She didn’t speak much, but she prepared everything meticulously. Her hair was always perfectly arranged, and she would wear an elegant, button-up dress to market every morning. We ate rice, I remember, almost every day. Rice with butter and parmesan, rice with tomato sauce and parmesan, rice with vegetables; the leftover rice was fried as croquettes the following day. That is what I remember: simple, repeated dishes, prepared with tremendous care.”

Giubbilei pauses. “I like the simplicity of something and how it makes you feel.” It’s a statement that seems to expand and contain the atmosphere of the studio. For a moment, we are silent. There is the sound of lunch being prepared in the studio kitchen; cupboards are being opened, and plates arranged. “When I was working on the vegetable garden recently, I felt a strange sort of joy. There is something so special about gardening in an enclosed space – in the tradition of the medieval hortus conclusus. Of course, it’s wonderful when the views are open and vast, but you’re so much deeper in your thoughts when working in an enclosed garden, you find yourself connected to each methodical action. It a different of intensity of feeling.”

In these gardens, the presence of flowers is discovered or earned – a thread of Japanese anemones hidden behind a wall of yew, or a dense bed of roses revealed at a garden’s periphery. This is less an act of abstinence than a measure of passion: In Giubbilei’s world, beauty is always at risk of overflowing itself. On his desk is a book – An Education in Happiness: The Lessons of Hesse and Tagore – by Flavia Arzeni. I think of Hesse and his gardeners; characters engaged in what might be understood as a type of ethics of attention. “You create limits,” says Giubbilei, “so that you might allow for possibility. Just as a still photograph is the proof of movement, so a moment of stillness in a garden is one part of a dance. Every angle, every point of view, is a single frame of ongoing movement – remove one element of the whole and all is lost.”

“Within a composition, there will be certain fixed points in the midst of chance and change. Repeated units like the topiary drums, for instance, or the presence of a single cherry tree. Around those points, the garden turns. People might see a type of stillness and perfectionism, but what there is, is organic matter. Dirt. Life beneath the surface.”

Members of the team pass through the studio library, they are setting the table for lunch. Quiches and bowls of olives pass by on white plates: they are arranged on the central work table, replacing design samples of limestone and oak. The light through the high windows is brighter, the drawings are returned to the board. The white walls retreat and release: the studio fills with the sound of loud conversation, and the hunger which rises from a morning’s work. It is a type of arrival.