Anecdote, biography and the garden in the intersecting life stories of Bernard Berenson, Jeanne Ghyka and Villa Gamberaia

This essay sits at the intersection between garden studies and biography. It takes up John Dixon Hunt’s call to study the ‘afterlife’ of gardens by examining the way in which a reliance on anecdote in popular garden publications has served to detach a female creator from the success of the famous garden she owned and partially redesigned. Theoretical literature on the role of artist biographies is used to explore the problematic categories of ‘real’ and ‘legendary’ biography and demonstrate how two ‘legends’, those of the famous art historian Bernard Berenson and Princess Catherine Jeanne Ghyka, have intersected in garden literature. In the late nineteenth century Ghyka introduced a much-admired water parterre to the historic garden of Villa Gamberaia in Tuscany. While the garden and the presence of water have continued to be celebrated, Ghyka is frequently dismissed as a narcissistic recluse. A close analysis of the anecdotal mode in biography and garden writing illuminates the reductive process by which both Ghyka’s life and the garden have been sexed and gendered in popular accounts.