I would have completely forgotten about Daphne Phelps’ book, “A House in Sicily” if it wasn’t for the mouse. We were doing some spring cleaning (a tip- don’t leave it for five years, things can get out of hand) when I found that a mouse had whiled away an afternoon by chewing away at the edges of a newspaper cutting which I’d roughly inserted into the book. Fortunately, the book itself was unharmed.
“A House in Sicily” is about Casa Cuseni, the Arts and Crafts house and garden created by Robert Kitson in Taormina, Sicily, which Daphne Phelps had inherited and looked after for 50 years. The garden is one of several outstanding gardens in Italy created by English men (and women) and is worthy to be mentioned alongside Thomas Hanbury’s ‘La Mortola’, Lady Walton’s ‘La Mortella’ and Ellen Willmott’s ‘La Boccanegra’, but stands out amongst them in that its name isn’t redolent of death or darkness.
My plans to look at the garden when I visited Taormina a few years ago were unfortunately thwarted by the girl at the Tourist Information Centre, where I’d gone to ask for directions. She looked positively alarmed when I mentioned Casa Cuseni. “You won’t get in”, she said, “And if you try to the owner will shout abuse at you”. The owner in question was Daphne Phelps, the author of the book. She was now elderly, and retired, but for most of her life had run Casa Cuseni as an upmarket guest house. Her instructions to the TiC to deter any potential visitors with threats of abuse was no doubt the result of a lifetime spent in hospitality. I know how she feels. She died the following year, and it was her obituary which I had carelessly inserted into her book and which the mice had chewed at.
“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods”, or as it is usually put,
In my three weeks away, I didn’t once switch on the TV or see an English newspaper and didn’t miss them one bit. On the other hand, I did miss my garden and it was a big disappointment to get back and find that the tomatoes had finished. But the flower garden, in spite of the onset of autumn, is still going strong. There’s colour everywhere, from the maples, which are turning a dark red, to the dahlias and cannas. At this time of year you expect the hybrid dahlias to start showing signs of wear and tear, but the tree dahlias are just getting into their stride and are covered in flowers.
Until very recently Paris was the undisputed capital of gastronomy. Then the Michelin inspectors turned up in Tokyo and found, to everyone’s amazement, that the standards in Tokyo were higher. Tokyo now has 14 3 Star restaurant’s compared to Paris’s 10 – and, to put things in perspective, London’s 1.
Japan is dark green, England pale green. The dark green of Japan is the forest which covers three quarters of its land mass. The pale green of England is its agricultural land- what we fondly call our “green and pleasant land”. The stark contrast between our two countries came home to me today in a 500 mile plane journey from Tokyo to Fukuoka. There was no cloud cover, so you could see the country clearly set out before you, from coast to coast. Essentially, Japan is one mountain range after another; steep mountian sides which are useless for farming, hence the dense forest. All the people and all the cultivation are crowded in the few flat parts, which are mainly along the coast. Japan has one quarter of the usable land of the UK and double the population.
