La Pietra Rossa

Maurizio Usai started to create La Pietra Rossa when he was 17 years old. There is a strong emphasis on roses, with over 250 varieties growing in the garden.

Head Gardener's Comment

The garden of my childhood was a natural landscape made of wild Lavenders, Almond Trees, Euphorbias and wild orchids, that grow naturally in the maquis of the hillside where, later, I was to develop a garden.
However, the gardens I first was introduced to, fell in the category of the commonplace garden that you find in my island region, Sardinia, surrounding holidaymakers' houses. They are full of stone pines, palm trees, bougainvilleas, hibiscus and oleanders; they are bright with harsh colours in the summertime, when the natural landscape around them becomes brown and shrinks under the rays of the burning sun, suspended while it waits for the first autumn rains.
I instinctively rejected such a model of garden, with its haphazard mix up of plants without any harmony, where shapes and colours clash in an unbearable chaos.
The first gardens I was attracted to when I started to be interested – I was little more than teenager then- were the English gardens: I decided then, against every logic, that I should have a garden of that kind, in the middle of my granite stone, sunburnt hills!