Trentham Gardens and Adventure Play - Italian Gardens

The Italian Garden has been brought back to life with one of the countries largest contemporary perennial plantings by leading designer Tom-Stuart Smith. This area of the garden looks superb from May through to January. The Italian Gardens is made up of two areas – The Upper and Lower Flower Gardens.

The recasting of the Lower Flower Garden – the main terrace of Sir Charles Barry’s Italian Garden, is respectful of its historical importance, but also introduces more contemporary design ideas. Barry’s concept of a grand formal landscape has few equals in Britain, and this has been enhanced with a more creative planting scheme. We have now almost doubled the proportion of the garden that is planted and the style of planting changes from the historic layout of bright blocks of coloured bedding and shrubs to an iconic contemporary display of interweaving drifts of herbaceous perennials.

The Upper Flower Garden has also been restored based on the original layout of Sir Charles Barry’s design. The horticultural schemes it once contained were considered to be amongst the most innovative and horticulturally trend setting in the country and this year’s summer display of “Edible Flowers” will hopefully help to ensure that our approach to restoration is much more about bringing the garden back to life than recreating a fossilised museum piece.

You can also enjoy the new Viewing Platform which provides a glimpse of the views where only honoured guests of Trentham Hall may once have enjoyed.

At the water’s edge, the towering statue of Perseus and Medusa dominate the scene. This statue was originally commissioned in the nineteenth century, and was cast from the original bronze in Florence by Italian Sculptor Benvenuto Cellini in 1550.

In Greek mythology, Medusa was a beautiful maiden, who angered the Goddess Athena. Outraged, Athena turned Medusa into a Gorgon, making her hair into living snakes. As well as this, any man who looked upon her face would be turned into stone. Perseus was the son of Zeus and Danaë. His grandfather, Acrisius, had been warned by an oracle that his grandson would kill him, so he put Perseus and his mother in a chest and threw it into the sea. The chest drifted to Seriphus, where King Polydectes helped the mother and child. After a time Polydectes fell in love with Perseus’s mother Danaë but was unsettled by the presence of her now full-grown son. He sent Perseus to bring the head of Medusa, thinking that Perseus would die in the attempt. The gods, however, loved Perseus. Hermes gave him a curved sword and winged sandals, and Athena gave him a mirror like a shield. Hades provided a helmet that made Perseus invisible. Thus armed, Perseus slew Medusa.