How does your garden grow: the subtropical gardener at Kew

‘I help design displays for the orchid festival. We can be planting in waders one minute and building concrete trees the next’

 ork in the subtropical section of the Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew, and I help design the displays for the gardens’ orchid festival.

We can be planting up in waders one minute and building concrete trees the next. The festival is on a very impressive scale: we have about 3,000 orchids and 2,000 bromeliads this year, including a lot of the showy hybrid varieties.

The first plant that I found interesting as a child was Arum italicum. I thought it looked creepy with its red berries in the shade. Then, when I was four or five years old, I saw a passionflower on a fence and thought “What is this freak?” It was so different from any other flower I had seen. It blew my mind. It almost became like a friend. I still visit it now.

I studied science and technology for nature and the environment at Udine University in Italy, then built my career in landscape design and horticulture. At home I don’t have a garden so it is all houseplants. I grow cacti and agave and we have many bromeliads, as well as orchids and aroids, and a gigantic Monstera – we are a bit invaded.

Kew is an amazing place, the people are very passionate and, with so many of the rarest plants in the world in one place, it is like a candy shop. Orchids are fascinating; the largest family of plants in the world. They have a range of interesting pollination strategies. Some use guides that are visible only in ultraviolet light, produce distinctive smells, or physically mimic female insects. Unlike other plants, they don’t usually give the reward of nectar. They are more about tricking than giving – orchids are not very generous.

The oil orchid, stanhopea, is pollinated by a small euglossine bee. The male collects the oil from inside the flower, and the more flowers he visits, the more attractive this bouquet of oils is to the female. It’s basically bee aftershave.
My favourite spot

I like the cactus area in the Princess of Wales Conservatory. I love the way they stand, the way they are so quiet and peaceful. It seems as if they are still, but there is an awful lot of work going on inside. I also like walking among the redwood grove. There are similar woods where I grew up in north-east Italy – dense canopies with little growing below, because the trees make the soil acid. The gigantic trees remind me of home.
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