ABOUT THE ROSE GARDEN
Around 1978, Vicky and Isabella Ducrot bought a farm, always called Caselle, in the Umbrian hills overlooking Lake Corbara, between Orvieto and the Amerino hills.
Surrounded by land that produced olives and wheat, Caselle was earlier populated by farmers with a stable and store for agricultural tools.
Restoration work on the old house has enhanced its original decorations and traditional Umbrian style. In addition, valuable elements made in the former Ducrot Furniture Factory in Palermo, between the early 1910s and 1930s, have been added to the country furniture.
The roses
Roses have always grown wild in Caselle: there are wild roses, Rosa Canina bushes, Sempervirens and an unknown Gallica that has sprouted up everywhere.
The garden was created without any planning by landscape specialists and architects, with the specific purpose of creating, as desired by the new owners, "a place for roses".
Vittorio Ducrot, Vicky, had worked in tourism since 1955 and much of his time was devoted to travel, on which he was accompanied by his wife Isabella.
Both profound connoisseurs of the five continents, passionate about history and art, the traditions of countries and peoples, strongly interested in territories and biodiversity, they wanted to create a 'spontaneous' garden in Caselle.
From the beginning of the 1970s, Vicky and Isabella began to take an interest in roses, their ability to adapt to different climates and the many species present: their trips assumed an increasingly botanical character.
As their passion for roses grew, they brought back cuttings or seeds of many specimens from their extensive travels in Asia and the Middle East, such as the 'Lijiang Rose' from China, a hybrid of Rosa Gigantea.
They found wild roses in all the Asian countries they visited: in China, Turkey, Siria, Jordan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, India, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and more.
After the death of Vicky Ducrot in 2022, the Corbara estate is being managed by her son Enrico.
"Designing and creating a rose garden was a useful way to escape an obsession: I had the rose in mind but did not know how to answer the question "which kind of rose"?The colour, the scent, the shape, the poise of the roses ended up blurred in the small graphic and acoustic space of those four letters, as if trying to count the columns of an imaginary temple..."
This was Mrs Isabella Ducrot’s thought which inspired the Garden of Roses.
Inside the estate is Isabella Ducrot's artistic atelier, where the artist created her first floral paintings and the 'Bella Terra', finding inspiration in every single flower in the garden.
The rose garden
Arte & Design
Caselle also hosts Isabella Ducrot's Atelier.
The artworks exhibited here were inspired by the scents, shapes and colours of the rose garden.
