20 ★ FTWeekend 19 October/20 October 2019House Home
Admirably, they have continued to
develop the garden, some of whose
trees date back to Circe herself. It is
now the Botanic Garden of the Brissago
Islands, visitable from April to October
after a charming boat ride from the
nearby Swiss coastline. The garden of
seven acres has recently been twinned
with the famous garden on Mainau in
Lake Constance. The twoislands have
lavish collections of half-hardy plants,
2,000 species on Brissago alone.
Circe ad a rock garden andh
nowadays itis expanded and planted to
show the flora of different zones of the
world, from Chile to South Africa. The
maintenance is good and the big plants
of Chile’s rose-red Lapageria on a trellis
are superb. Green-grey euphorbias,
silvery artemisias and bushes of
lavender typify the Mediterranean
sector and near the entrance I was
surprised by big bushes of the spotted
toad lily, or Tricyrtis hirta, in heavy
flower. These lovely autumn flowering
plants prefer cool shade and in Britain
are magnets for slugs. I have never seen
them so big, but the surrounding lake
keeps the garden free of frost in most
years and is exceptionally favourable
for gardening. Camellias and white-
flowered Franklinias thrive: April
would be a great time to visit.
Emden’s neoclassical house is topped
with statues. It is now a hotel and
restaurant and is a charming venue for
conferences. I sat and enjoyed a non-
Homeric lunch — risotto flavoured
with rhubarb — after admiring an
old cork oak tree surely planted in
Circe’s lifetime.
A year after his visit Joyce wrote with
a question for the baroness. In the
Odyssey he god Hermes gives Odysseust
the flowering plant moly to protect him
from Circe’s charms. There have been
many theories about its identity,
including a snowdrop, but none is
secure and the plant was probably
legendary for Homer too.
Remembering her fine garden, Joyce
wrote to ask the baroness for her view.
He wanted to work it into his Circe
chapter in which his hero Bloom
visits the temptations of Nighttown,
the brothel area of Dublin. Would
laughter do, he wondered wittily, as
an antidote to seduction by a
prostitute? The baroness replied
that black garlic, Allium niger, was
a likelier moly. I did not see garlic
in the gardenthat perpetuates her
work. Happily I did not find it, either,
in my rhubarb risotto.I
have just visited Circe’s island. In
Homer’sOdyssey t is called Aeaea,i
the island where Circe delights
modernfeminists by turning
Odysseus’s male companions into
pigs. Homer’s island was mythical, but
it has not lacked claimants ever since.
One of the earliest was Monte Circeo,
on the coast of Italy about60 miles
south-east of Rome. It has a prominent
cave in its cliff face andis believed to
have been an island in the very distant
geological past.
This summer, explorers announced
they had found Circe’s lair ecause theb
cave, they discovered, was even deeper
than it looked and inside it they hit on
some prehistoric pottery. The
announcement was fatuous. Homer’s
island, like Circe, never existed in the
real world.
My Circe’s island does. It is a
fascinating garden on the Brissago
Islands in the Swiss sector of Lake
Maggiore. A hundred years ago tsi
owner received a famous visitor. He
had heard she was known locally as the
Circe, or Siren, and had buried seven
husbands “tearlessly”. He was James
Joyce, working at the time on the
episodes called Sirens and Circe in his
groundbreaking novel,Ulysses. This
Circe was suitably exotic, the Baroness
St Leger, no less. She had been born in
St Petersburg and was believed to be an
illegitimate daughter ofTsar Alexander
II. As Antoinette Bayer, she was said to
have been ordered to leave Russia on
48 hours’ notice. She gravitated to
Italy, frequenting the lakes for reasons
of health. Since 1885, she and her third
husband, an Irish peer, had made an
impressive garden on the larger of the
two Brissago Islands which he had
bought with a family legacy. Once a
home for sectarian nuns, the islands
were uninhabited, but St Leger was
undaunted. He bought loads of earth,
plants and gardeners and boated them
across from the mainland. The two of
them lived on the site of the formernunnery but in 1897 he left the
baroness, reportedly finding her too
impetuous. Her daughter had also
left, escaping in a boat with the
gardener’s assistance.
In 1919 Joyce, staying in nearby
Locarno, learnt that the baroness, aged
63, had scrolls on her walls that were
painted with scenes from theOdyssey.
So he contacted her, and she was rowed
out across the lake to meet him,
carrying her dog in her arms. To his
delight she called out to him that he
was clearly not English. “No, Irish,” he
called back. He climbed up through the
garden, full of everything from banana
plants to hydrangeas asshe had
described it in an RHS journal had
described for British readers. He
happens not to mention the garden,
and as for the Odyssey pictures, he
found them disappointing, because the
Sirens looked as if they had never been
in a sea breeze.
Antoinette, the gardening baroness,made up for the anticlimax. She was
surrounded by dolls, mostly in a
Japanese style: other literary visitors
describe them as arranged on her sofa
when they were not being cradled in
her arms. She took Joyce to a trunk full
of books and a bundle of letters and
gave him both, saying they had been
collected by a Greek lover of hers
whose fine photo Joyce saw at the foot
of her bed. The books were on erotic
perversions and the letters were
remarkably obscene. Richard Ellmann,
Joyce’s iographer, records how Joyceb
told the tale later to a fellow novelist
and remarked: “A writer should never
write about the extraordinary. That is
for the journalist.” The remark throws
light onUlysses.
In 1927 the Circe of Lake Maggiore
went bankrupt, thanks to the high-risk
investments to which she was prone.
She sold the garden and island to a
remarkable Jewish businessman, Max
Emden, who owned the most famousdepartment store in Hamburg among
much else. She died destitute years
later, but he did not let her down. He
preserved her garden and built a house
in classical style in the middle of it. He
continued her exotic partying,
entertaining young ladies who would
water-skiand dance naked n thei
garden. He combined a love of polo
with Buddhist meditation.
In the 1930s many of Emden’s assets
were seized by the Nazis, including
most of his superb art collection. This
April, he and they returned to fame in
a German TV documentary,Also Life is
an Art, which identified two of Emden’s
fine Canalettos and led to their
restitution to the family. Other
masterpieces, including a great Monet
of a field of poppies, are still under
dispute. Fortunately his house and
home are not.
In 1940 Emden died and the island
and house were acquired by three local
cantons, Ticino buying a half-share.The villa built by Max Emden on Brissago Island can be seen on the approach across Lake Maggiore Alamy—Robin Lane Fox
On gardens
Myth and reality converge in a
magical Lake Maggiore garden in
the form of a baroness, Joyce’s
‘Ulysses’ and a neoclassical house
A Bloom of
one’s own
OCTOBER 19 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 16/10/2019- 17:40 User:elizabeth.robinson Page Name:RES20, Part,Page,Edition:RES, 20, 1