Garden Envy in Palermo: Enchanted Statues, Iron Gates and Sun-Dappled Silence (SpiceLines)

Palermo’s Jardin Botanico Carlos Thays holds over 5000 types of plants, shrubs and trees. Some exotic specimens inhabit another world where they can just be glimpsed through the splotched and speckled glass of a decaying 19th-century winter house.

Don’t get me wrong. Big public gardens are wonderful. Swaths of green grass, broad sidewalks, ponds for sailing toy yachts. Room for joggers, jugglers and soccer players to put on a lively show.

But it’s in the smaller, more hidden gardens, the ones that are tucked behind iron railings or locked doors, the ones that have neglected corners where the cobwebs aren’t whisked away, where the manicured gives way to the jungle, that real enchantment lurks.

In Palermo one morning, we forded the cacophonous traffic on Santa Fe Avenue and slipped in through an open gate on the other side. Suddenly we found ourselves in sun-dappled silence. The only sound was our footsteps crunching the gravel paths of the Jardin Botanico Carlos Thays. We felt as if a century had melted away.

Here the clocks have stopped and most of the fairy-tale park's denizens have been captured in mid-gesture.

In the Roman Garden, Mercury is frozen, winged feet never quite able to leave the ground.

Nearby a virginal Diana (or is she a modest Venus?) with unseeing eyes tries endlessly to warm her cold white flesh in the sun.

A bronze, plump-cheeked boy smiles eternally, even as spiders spin webs around him. Water flows from his jug, but never from his eyes.

The famously abandoned cats--there are scores of them lurking in foliage, under benches, by greenish ponds--keep a close watch on intruders…

Most especially they watch the dogs who wait for their walker (probably having a café con leche nearby).

Strolling down the shaded sidewalks of old Palermo, we encountered mysteriously overgrown gardens with jungle-like foliage bursting through iron railings.

What lies behind these elaborately scrolled gates? Sometimes a path seemed to lead to a well-tended mansion, cool and dark inside with inlaid marble floors. But more often we glimpsed derelict houses, stucco peeling like a skin disease, that might have belonged to an Argentine Miss Havisham. The gates are perpetually locked….does anyone ever go in, or out?

It’s always tempting to dream of your own enchanted garden.

On Gorriti Street we passed through Paul’s high portal and followed narrow tracks down a wondrous allee of potted bay trees.

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At the end, just around the corner there was a glass house filled with orchids and enormous pots—ingredients for making one’s own magical garden. And like a Chinese puzzle box, the glass house led to a darkly exotic tea shop, where you could buy rose-scented leaves for sipping under the palo borracho trees. (For a fistful of pesos all this could be yours.)

But maybe Palermo’s most enchanted garden can’t be glimpsed from the street at all. No. First you must wave a magic card, then push the swirly handle and the door will open.