Best Plants of Puglia 2024

The first summer I visited my husband’s extended family in Puglia, I came away besotted with the charming container gardens that adorned the fairy tale-like historic centers of the region’s towns and cities. How moving, I thought, that the residents of these homes didn’t let a lack of soil or space hold them back from gardening.

But I have to admit that after three summers witnessing the mayhem of mass tourism, I’ve become suspicious. I can’t always tell if a lovely display of potted annuals, succulents, and tropical plants is tended by a thoughtful inhabitant or if it’s been staged to serve as an Instagram-worthy backdrop for Airbnb guests. To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with more plants, regardless of why they’re there. I’ve just become, with time, more charmed by plants that don’t seem like they’re pandering to anyone.

On this trip, I cultivated an appreciation for substance over style; for horticultural wonders planted decades ago, or native species growing in the wild, or plants providing nourishment. Here is the flora that moved me this year.

The Yucca of Bari

Now I keep an eye out for old-timers; those stalwart specimens that can’t have been purchased at a garden center and popped in a pot overnight. The first three plants on this list are all probably older than me, starting with this Yucca gigantea I came across in Bari Vecchia.

Rising from a small square of earth cut into the piazza’s pavement, it struck me with its grace and height, grazing the first-floor windows of the surrounding palazzi. I felt a certain tenderness towards its elephant feet, strewn with cigarette butts yet still dignified.

Bari is a very beautiful city, but any Pugliese will tell you that up until twenty years ago, it was not advised to enter the old part of the center (Bari Vecchia) without a local escort and a legit reason for being there. Nowadays, the labyrinthine streets are spotless and bustling, full of spritz bars, gift shops, and hordes of tourists wandering aimlessly.

Obviously, it’s a good thing that the streets are safer and cleaner and the buildings and monuments well cared-for. At the same time, local residents have been driven out by luxury rentals and hotels. The few that remain are now surrounded by loud bars, restaurants, and crowds, lacking essential services like groceries and hardware stores.

Yucca gigantea are native to Mexico and Central America and grow well in Puglia’s hot, relatively dry climate. They require very little maintenance and can live for up to 100 years. I’m not an expert at dating yuccas, but it comforts me to imagine that this one might have been planted by and for the residents of Bari Vecchia before the tourists started flowing in, and that it will still be standing when, I fervently hope, the cities of Italy find some equilibrium between serving visitors and serving their own people.

Impossible Vines

It’s incredible what grows out of the paving stones of these medieval towns in Puglia. In the town of Grottaglie, these vines — a grape on the left and the other I did not identify — cover an entire alley and the first floor of a building, respectively, yet they originate from ridiculously tiny crevices of earth!

For something to grow that big and healthy, a sprawling network of roots must exist underneath, intermingling with the millennia’s worth of rubble and ruins upon which the town sits. Imagine how tough these plants are, to send forth so much foliage year on year without much doting. It really calls into question everything you learn about gardening. I wish I knew who was responsible for these plants, so I could interrogate them. But I also suspect the plants might just be responsible for themselves.

The Old-Growth Prickly Pears of Grottaglie

This year was the second time I’ve visited Grottaglie, which is known for its ceramics. My father-in-law knows a ceramicist there who lives in what can only be described as an enchanted villa. Since moving in, he can’t stop finding treasures underneath his house, from priceless Greek pottery to ancient cisterns to a secret Templar chapel complete with 13^th-century frescoes. 

I was blown away by all of it, but of course I was particularly taken with the romantic, 19^th-century garden, which contained several sets of towering, gnarled, old-growth prickly pears.

I didn’t glean much information about these; all I know is I’ve never seen trunks like that on a prickly pear. While they might not have been as old as the frescoes in the cellar, their timeworn demeanor certainly matched the mood of the day.

The Pomegranate of Brindisi

Tucked behind the 12^th-century temple of San Giovanni al Sepolcro in Brindisi is another magical garden that feels like stepping through time. It’s much easier to find information about the architecture and history of the church than about the garden, the origins of which are a mystery to me. It has the vibes of a monastic kitchen garden, full of herbs and fruit trees, including a pomegranate laden with perfectly formed fruits which were just starting to turn a rosy hue at the end of July.

Like many Mediterranean crops, pomegranates carry no shortage of lore throughout the East and West. They are native to present-day Iran and India but were naturalized across Europe thousands of years ago. Coming from America, it’s strange to be in a place like Puglia where the conquests and upheavals that shaped its culture and landscape feel like ancient history rather than fresh wounds. California grows pomegranates, too, thanks to Spanish Jesuit missionaries who sought to remake the land and its inhabitants in their image.

Plants have stories to tell. Resting on a stone bench in this contemplative garden, slightly delirious from the heat, I listened to the pomegranate.

This Aloe

This wouldn’t be Botany on the Balcony if I didn’t properly honor at least one container-grown beauty, and an impressive potted aloe in Ostuni earned a spot on the list. A tumble of Baroque buildings encircled in whitewashed medieval walls and perched on a hillside overlooking the sea, Ostuni is unsurprisingly popular with tourists. But lots of regular people live there, too. I suspect this aloe belongs to one of them.

I love the way it completely fills its little niche between the plastered wall and winding, narrow stairway. I also appreciate the simple container, which is real clay and not imitation plastic. Whoever takes care of this plant has clearly been applying the right mix of care and neglect to achieve such a mountain of spiky, manicured curls. 

This Caper

Have you ever seen a caper bush? They are ubiquitous in Puglia, and I had never set eyes on them before going there, which as a caper fan was pretty embarrassing. Capers are made by brining or pickling the unopened flower buds. And caper berries are the ripe fruits of the same plant!

But by far the coolest thing about caper bushes is that they can grow ANYWHERE. If you look up at the crumbling walls of castles, fortresses, and palaces in Puglia, you’ll find capers. In the ground, they have a mounding growth habit, but when growing from cracks and crevices they trail beautifully.

This glorious example, spotted in Grottaglie, was right at eye level where I could fully admire its long tendrils of coin-like leaves.

Mentuccia

When you ask a Pugliese how they make a dish that calls for mint, such as zucchini alla poverella, they often won’t say menta, but mentuccia. In Italian, the diminutive suffix “uccia” is added to words to indicate smallness with a drop of pity. So, what is this poor little mint of which they speak?

Well, one day during my visit I was inspecting the various weeds growing around the drainpipe run-off in the back of the country house. I came across a little plant with leaves resembling oregano and flowers that reminded me of certain wild mints that grow here in the Bay Area. Rubbing its foliage left a minty herbal scent on my fingertips. My iNaturalist app confirmed my suspicions — this was the famous mentuccia!

Calamintha nepeta, commonly called lesser Calamint, is a perennial herb in the mint family that grows throughout the Mediterranean and has a myriad of culinary uses. Before commercially grown mint could be bought at the supermarket, Italians would forage the countryside for this humble and abundantly available herb to flavor their dishes. 

I wasn’t quite brave enough to eat the one watered by runoff, but I was extremely proud of myself for identifying it.

The Family Almond Trees

Also behind the house is a stand of four or five almond trees. My in-laws tell me they once belonged to a much larger almond orchard that no longer exists. Tall but sparse, they provide a meager shade that is nonetheless welcome during the scorching summer days. They also provide a TON of almonds.

Everyday my mother-in-law collected handfuls of fallen almonds and broke them open with a rock on a stone bench for a snack. She looked for hard brown ones that had lost their green outer shells and would have nice crunchy fruits inside. When a thunderstorm hit in mid-August, it knocked all the almonds off the trees, and she gathered them all into a big blue bucket.

I don’t know what she did with them, as we had to leave soon after. The nearby town of Ceglie is known for their almond cookies, which I would love to try making someday. Maybe next year. This year, we simply enjoyed a never-ending supply of fresh almonds, which contain lots of vitamins that improve mood and reduce stress; I called them our mental health almonds.

The Oak

Olive trees get all the attention in Puglia, and for good reason. They dominate the landscape and produce large quantities of olive oil prized by Italians and throughout the world. But anyone driving through the olive groves can’t help but notice that something is amiss.

Olive trees infected with Xylella, the deadly disease that arrived in Puglia in 2013, exhibit telltale patches of reddish-brown foliage that eventually turn gray and subsume the whole tree. They say the spread has slowed, but anecdotally, Xylella-free groves were hard to come by in the areas we frequented, and the trees on and around my husband’s family’s land look worse every year. 

One of the factors behind the problem is that the mass cultivation of olives in Puglia created a monoculture, which are particularly susceptible to disease outbreaks (like bananas in Colombia). My father-in-law likes to remind me that before humans planted way too many olives everywhere, much of Puglia was covered in oak forests.

This year, I started paying more attention to the oaks. Though not as ubiquitous as olives, they are plentiful. The regional varieties, such as downy oak and Macedonian oak, have lovely lobed leaves that make them easy to identify. Like in California — and especially Oakland, as the name implies — they are essential players in the native ecosystem that have not always been treated with the reverence they deserve. Some municipalities have now started reforesting areas with oaks and other Xylella-resistant trees to boost biodiversity and resilience.

Strolling through Carovigno one evening, I came across an archway decorated with bundles of dried plants. Upon closer inspection, each bundle had a handwritten label, and there was a small explanatory sign affixed to the wall. A group called Lamia Santolina had gathered these plant specimens from the outskirts of town and asked locals to confirm their names (in dialect) and common uses in “an effort to care for and keep alive vegetal memory.”

I recognized one bundle right away by its ruffly leaves: “fragna” roverella, or downy oak. On the walk from my husband’s uncle’s farm to the country house, which only takes five minutes but under the relentless sun makes you feel like Lawrence of Arabia, shade from these trees provided moments of sweet relief. The tag informed me that its acorns are traditionally fed to pigs; another reason to keep them around.

By most estimates, Puglia has lost about a third of its olive trees to Xylella. The scale of the problem and the sense of loss feel overwhelming. But when my father-in-law walks among the fields of dead olives, he spots oak seedlings sprouting up from the rust-red soil. Puglia hasn’t forgotten the oak, and neither should we.