Victoria House and Orchid House, Giardini La Mortella

La Mortella is a garden of about two hectares created at Forio, on the Zaro promontory, by Susana Walton, the Argentine-born wife of the composer William Walton. The couple settled on Ischia in October 1949, then bought a plot of volcanic rock where myrtles grew, hence the name of the place. Russell Page, called in in 1956, drew the basic plan of the valley garden; the villa was completed in 1962. Susana Walton went on developing the site for more than fifty years, including the hill garden, in which Page took no part; widowed in 1983, she opened the garden to the public in 1991 (the Italian Wikipedia page says 1990). The Fondazione William Walton La Mortella now owns and runs it.

For the greenhouses, according to an account published in an online newsletter about Italy (Substack), Russell Page had suggested their site for the uninterrupted view over the garden and the sunsets, and Susana Walton transformed them before the 1991 opening: one became a split-level orchid house, the neighbouring 'growing house' a tea room. The same account presents the Victoria House as another important construction. The garden is a member of the Victoria Conservancy, an American association that supplies seed and growing advice. In May 2000 a scale replica of the Victoria House appeared on La Mortella's stand in the Grand Marquee of the Chelsea Flower Show, with a waterlily seeded from the Ischia specimen.

The garden's website speaks of a 'tropical greenhouse'; the magazine Wanted in Rome uses the word glasshouse. The Victoria House belongs to the valley garden, the lower part laid out by Russell Page. At its centre a pool is dominated by 'Bocca', a sculpture by Simon Verity that reproduces the mask painted by John Piper on the stage curtain for Façade, Walton's setting of poems by Edith Sitwell; Wanted in Rome also credits the sculptor with a Roman-style fountainhead inside the greenhouse, and describes a curtain of creepers and orchids framing the pool. Photographs published on Wikimedia Commons show a stone wall planted with ferns, water running from a carved face.

The orchid house is described as a split-level greenhouse. The collaborative OpenStreetMap map draws two small separate buildings, the 'Serra della Victoria' and the 'Serra delle orchidee', roughly sixty metres apart. The official site counts three tropical greenhouses, including the Temple of the Sun; but the page devoted to the latter describes it as a converted cistern rather than a greenhouse.

The giant waterlily Victoria amazonica occupies the pool. Its round leaves can reach 2.5 m across according to several articles (the garden's website gives six feet in the wild); its flowers, white and female on the first evening, red and male the next, change sex and colour in a single night. The garden recalls that the plant, discovered by the German botanist Thaddaeus Haenke in 1801, reached Europe when Joseph Paxton coaxed it into flower in 1849 in a greenhouse built for it.

The greenhouse also grows orchids, bromeliads, aroids and two climbers: Strongylodon macrobotrys, from the Philippines, with emerald-green clusters, and a Thunbergia with red and yellow flowers. The orchid house holds the hybrid Miltassia Lady Susana Walton, created in 2005 by an Italian breeder, Mr Pozzi, in honour of the garden's founder. Outside, other aquatic plants extend the theme: Nymphaea caerulea in the pond behind the crocodile pool, naturalised Euryale ferox, lotuses and tropical waterlilies.

The Victoria House lies in the valley garden, where the visit begins. The garden covers about two hectares on split levels, with ramps and stairways; the official site advises allowing at least two hours. The visit is not guided: a map with a suggested itinerary is handed out at the ticket office, and an interactive route is available by QR code. The garden is open from April to early November. Chamber-music concerts are held at weekends in spring and autumn in the villa's museum, and youth-orchestra concerts in the Greek Theatre on Thursday evenings from mid-June to the end of July. A bar stands inside the grounds; from the top of the hill the view takes in the Bay of Forio.