Victoria Greenhouse and Vertical Garden, Villa Taranto Botanical Gardens

The Villa Taranto garden owes its existence to the Scottish captain Neil Boyd McEacharn, who bought the villa on the Castagnola headland between Pallanza and Intra in the early 1930s and surrounded it with a botanical park completed in 1940; Italian Wikipedia dates the purchase to 1930, a Piedmont Region booklet to 1931. The garden has been open to the public since 1952, and McEacharn, who died in 1964, lies in a mausoleum chapel in the grounds.

For the greenhouse itself the sources are sparser. Neither the garden's website, nor Wikipedia, nor the regional booklet, nor the local press consulted dates its construction or names its designer, and the Wikidata item describing it carries no date or dimensions. The available landmarks concern the plant it houses: the official website states that the Victoria cruziana seeds arrived from the Stockholm botanic garden in 1956, and VerbanoNews wrote in 2018 that the species has found its habitat there since 1956.

The most recent dates concern the vertical garden. A 2016 VareseNews article lists the “vertical gardens in the Victoria Cruziana greenhouse” among that season's novelties, and VerbanoNews described it in 2018 as “recently installed”. More broadly, on 25 August 2012 a tornado destroyed most of the trees and plants in the garden, which reopened for the 2013 season.

Free photographs on Wikimedia Commons (2010 and 2022) show the greenhouse: a light metal-framed structure, glazed on the roof as on the walls; fine glazing bars divide the roof into small panes, and spotlights are fixed to the members. The roof rises in sloping planes above rectangular basins edged with white copings: one holds the Victoria lilies, another tropical water lilies, one of them with a violet flower.

The “Giardino Verticale” occupies the background of the greenhouse. The Piedmont booklet describes it as a structure covered with plants rooted in panels of fibrous material; the garden's website adds that several species take turns on it and change the colour of the wall through the year. In the 2022 photographs the back of the house appears carpeted with foliage in front of a trellis.

The OpenStreetMap outline, which groups the greenhouse and the vertical garden under one name, covers a rectangle of about 19 m by 11 m.

Victoria cruziana is a giant water lily native to Paraguay and Argentina according to the garden's website; the genus lives in the great river basins of South America (Amazon, Paraná). Its circular leaves reach almost two metres across and can carry about ten kilograms. The flowers open in the late afternoon, white and scented of pineapple, close the next morning, then reopen the following evening, pink and then deep red, before wilting and sinking into the water to let the fruit ripen (VerbanoNews, 2018).

The official website also mentions tropical and subtropical plants around the basins; the photographs show a banana plant, among others. Another glazed building in the park, the “Serrone”, presents, from late April to October, the cactus and succulent collection assembled by the head of the greenhouses; a regional booklet also describes, at point 11 of the route, a “winter garden” with water lilies, succulents and exotic plants, without the sources saying whether the two names refer to the same place. The 2018 programme announced a weekend (22–24 June) devoted to the greenhouses, with lithops, scented pelargoniums and Alluaudia from Madagascar.

According to the regional booklet, the Victoria greenhouse is point 3 on the garden's numbered route, shortly after the tulip and dahlia maze, and the Giardino Verticale is seen in the same spot. The Victoria is on view from 15 June to late October, so the house is best visited in summer and early autumn. The garden, which charges admission, runs autumn hours from 19 October to 8 December 2026 and closes on orange or red weather alerts for storms or rain.

The Serrone, in the upper part of the park, shows its succulent collection from late April to October. The founder's mausoleum (point 4), the rhododendron wood (point 5) and the terraced gardens (point 8) complete the circuit.