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The Roseto Botanica "Carla Fineschi"

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Roseto "Carla Fineschi" di Cavriglia

In May of 2002 I fortunate enough to be asked to spend a few days at the Roseto Botanico “Carla Fineschi”. It is difficult to sit down and put into words what I saw and experienced during that brief sojourn to the hills of Tuscany.

This needs to change. Several people have since asked me what I thought of the garden. I could not wax rhapsodic about wrought iron swags of ramblers, rows of weeping standards, mass plantings of this or that rose. Why? For the simple reason they do not really exist there.

The Roseto Botanico “Carla Fineschi” is simply the vision, work and lifetime devotion of an extraordinary gentleman. Professor Gianfranco Fineschi. There are no committees, no board of directors, no patrons to please, no Historical Societies to defer to.

Rather it is the garden of one man, who many years ago fell in love with roses. Now, many years later that love of roses is still evident in everything he does with the garden.

That is singular genius of the Roseto. You want to study the works of Tantau? All gather there in one area, arranged chronologically and grouped by various members of the family. How about McGredy? His painted floribundas line one of the main walkways and you can actually see right before you the progress made from rose to rose as his hybridizing work within this group increases in focus. Harkness? Which one? Father, Son – they are there. Delbard, Kordes, Meilland, Cocker, Austin – the list goes on. They are there, much like books displayed on a shelf in a library for us to study and learn.

That is why this garden is so, so important to the rose world. For everyone who loves roses, the history of our favourite garden flower is here. There is simply not a collection like it anywhere and it exists because Professor Fineschi pursued it with a singular vision for all these years.

We are lucky and owe him our gratitude and I suspect for the Professor the greatest way we can say thank you is simply visit the garden. Not as pilgrims coming to pay homage to a great man, but as rose lovers coming to spend time with a unique gentleman who many years ago fell in love with roses. Just like we did.

The Fineschi Garden is one I have both read and heard about over the years, but while I though it interesting, I must confess it was not high on my must visit list. It does not really get the attention the big public gardens in Europe do. I do not know why, perhaps because it is a bit out of the way, perhaps because it is not really a “park” in the sense of large expanses of space with picnic areas. Nevertheless, for whatever reason it does not seem to make the must visit list of rose gardens around the world.

It does not have a big gift shop, a fancy tearoom or a place to hold weddings even. For all these reasons, it is difficult to sum up just why this garden is so important until you have been, or you talk with someone who has. Luckily, through the work of the World Federation of Rose Societies Historic Conservation Committee, articles written about it and the hard work of folks like Marily Young, more people are going, and more people are convincing others to go.

The Roseto Botanico “Carla Fineschi” is not really a garden in the sense of what we expect a garden to be. It is certainly not a “display” garden, although it is beautiful to spend time in. The Roseto is really a library. Moreover, what the Library of Congress is to book lovers the Roseto is to Rose lovers. Only instead of collections of works of great authors, the Roseto is a collection of the works of great rose breeders.

Over 6000 different varieties of roses from Old to New are on display taxonomically around the 100-year-old house. That is right over 6000! Moreover, the Professor is adding to the collection all the time. The collection is so extensive that even the breeders themselves contact the Professor to get budwood of their own roses they no longer have!