A new dawn

Park at the monastery below and walk up to the house through the olive groves,” advises garden designer Tania Compton. I’ve just driven from Athens, down through the Peloponnese peninsula to the middle of three rocky limbs of land that extend into the sea, where the Ionian meets the Aegean. Until recently, this was one of the wildest areas of Greece, blessed with a diverse landscape of mountain forests, meadows, steep rocky slopes, abundant wildflowers and intensely scented herbs.

I follow a well-trodden path, curving gently through the dappled shade past an amphitheatre-like terraced olive grove. The house sits high on the brow of the hill, rising above the silvery crowns of the olive trees. Immense, aged stone walls hold the land as they have done for generations, accommodating all manner of wild plants.

Heading upwards, I reach a level, planted plateau – an archaic glade where bird song fills the air from the branches of almonds, oaks and olives. Pale silver globes of Teucrium fruticans ‘Ouarzazate’ and Lavandula dentata var. candicans blaze with buzzing bees. Butterflies flutter on the purple flowers of Salvia leucophylla and the last of the Oenothera lindheimeri flowers. If one of Tania’s aims here was to enrich biodiversity, she has succeeded.

The owners, James and Charlotte Heneage, didn’t formally brief Tania when they asked her to design the garden for their home from home, but their shared appreciation of Alberti’s 15th-century architectural treatise De re aedificatoria was strongly influential. When Tania first saw the place, she told them: “You have found the perfect Alberti site. It has everything – the mountains, the sea, the landscape.”

Her response to the site was to design a sensually rich, warm space of greys, greens, blues and purples, which drifts out to connect the eye to the most breathtaking panorama. To the east, a vast face of craggy limestone rises to the peak of Mount Taygetos, known locally as Profitis Ilias, or Prophet Elias, in whose honour the the house and gar