Drawing on the wildflowers she loved as a child, Margarida Maia has created a garden in central Portugal that is now an Instagram sensation
WORDS NOEL KINGSBURY PHOTOGRAPHS MARIANNE MAJERUS
The Ribatejo region of Portugal is a landscape of gently rolling hills, fields, small farms, eucalyptus plantations and occasional patches of wilder landscape. High on a hilltop, some way from the nearest village, is the home of retired paediatrician Margarida Maia and her husband António, a cartoonist for the Portuguese daily newspaper Correio da Manhã. Here, Margarida has created a garden that is fast becoming something of a social-media sensation.
Margarida is very much an accidental gardener. With little gardening background, she only started making a garden here in 2017 because her son was getting married. “I wanted to have the celebration at our house,” she explains. “And I wanted to make a garden for that event. That’s how I got started.” Pleased with the results, she began to take rather lovely pictures of her garden on her phone, and to post them on Instagram. Gradually, over time, her garden images received more and more views, and she got more and more followers, until before long she had an audience in the tens of thousands.
Six years on, her early plantings are now maturing as solid and nicely integrated clumps of agapanthus, rosemary, Teucrium fruticans and, sprawling out below, the silvery foliage of Arctotis. It’s a resilient, low-maintenance combination, ideal for a Mediterranean climate where summers are hot and dry, and the rainy season of September to May is increasingly unreliable.
The bulk of the garden is at the rear of the house – a lawn surrounded by extensive areas of planting that are dominated by perennials, but also include many shrubs, native sub-shrubs and annuals. It is exuberant, diverse and eclectic, but held together by plentiful repetitions, particularly of Oenothera lindheimeri, Verbena bonariensis and the fluffy pink-tinted muhly grass Muhlenbergia capillaris. In many countries it might not seem a remarkable planting, but in Portugal it really stands out.
In Portugal you are far more likely to see plentiful pots of pelargoniums and ancient cymbidium orchids lining balconies and exterior stairways. In the north of the country you find huge camellias, and large and profusely flowering roses just about everywhere. In early summer, Portuguese villages can be wonderfully colourful, with everything that can flower seemingly blooming all at once. But this is not a tradition that appeals to Margarida. “I want something that looks more natural,” she says. “I like wildflowers.
