High clouds are stretching out in the distance and on the sides of the dormant volcano at Palazzo there are larval flows covered with pasture land and groups of cypress trees, all set against the backdrop of the volcano's peak.
Jonathan Radford lives and works in the Palazzo Cervini, a Renaissance palazzo and hermitage in Italy. Since 2001, he has been renovating and redesigning parts of the Tuscan estate, which was originally commissioned by Pope Marcello II in 1539.
An English landscape gardener Jonathan founded the company Ecologica, after moving to the south of Italy sixteen years ago and has an impressive list of projects to his name.
Jonathan's thinking is avant-garde and ethical. At the moment he is worried about being associated with an ecology movement that can spend '£20m on the Thames estuary on a project that won't work'.
Irritated by the dominance of big names when millions are doing their bit, he said that 'the ecology movement is happening on its own without names like Al Gore'.
Jonathan for one has set out on an ecology mission to change a very British garden feature, the grass lawn.
"I am in a personal battle with lawn and water," Jonathan said.
"I am using this market force, this will to be ecological, to get rid of as many stupid English green lawns as I can, starting here in Tuscany.
"I am doing this all over the world, I am doing a job in Miami, I have had offers from Sydney and from all over the place."
The green grass lawn, that old friend of the English suburbs, is his target for reasons that become patently clear.
"In general, Tuscany has major problems with water," Jonathan said. "All of a sudden you see these huge oases developing around houses that have been bought and renovated by rich foreigners.
"What annoys me is the total lack of respect that foreigners have for the gardening styles in Tuscany, mainly English, American, German and Swiss going down from the top. Well, they are not in England they are in the Mediterranean now."
Jonathan worked on these estates and those of affluent Italians with a long lineage, and he brought to them an awareness of the whole environment, taking on the task of promoting the natural flowering meadow.
The long grasses gently swaying in the breeze are kinder water consumers than their green lawn counterparts.
"Why I came up with the wild flower meadow is because firstly, long grass does not need as much water as short grass, as cutting it short obviously creates massive evaporation," Jonathan said.
"During the time it is growing you don't have to cut and water it frequently, so you are saving a lot of water.
"Number two, we have got amazing insect life including glow flies and butterflies and amazing natural flora."
Ecological for certain, but just like telling someone to give up their prize Austin Healey Sprite as it is fuel inefficient, the pill is easier to swallow if you offer an electric hybrid Jaguar replacement.
One wealthy client was related to high profile ecologist, Zac Goldsmith, so Jonathan knew that 'without any shadow of a doubt' he had to do an ecological garden.
When the relative returned after five months to see that his perfectly irrigated three acre English lawn had become an 'ecological paradise', he did not appreciate its biodiversity.
"I had thousands and thousands of poppies, different varieties of onions, natural wild onions, garlic, orchids, muscari hyacinths, and the goldfinches and the nightingales were coming in and enjoying the natural habitat because I had the insects," Jonathan said.
"But he took a real distaste to it and our working relationship slowly broke down from there."
So Jonathan undeterred has written a yet to be published book about it, The Smiths and Jones of Kentishire, which is 'a direct wink at these people that are very hypocritical about the environment, the artistic rich with a luxurious lifestyle', he said.
Still, Jonathan's courage is fuelled with a love for nature. His first published book A Green Existence aimed to stimulate people into living their dream instead of thinking that 'you have to give up your whole life for a bank', Jonathan said.
"Gardening is linked with loving your life and loving the force that gives things to you, we have everything for a reason, hair for a reason we have eyes.
"I think love is the basis of gardening, people are just using the garden for an expression of their love of nature," he said.
"Just as a lion runs on pure instinct I believe that we are exactly the same we can be completely utterly helped by destiny and I am very spiritual in that sense.
"You see leaves unfold with no effort, there is an energy that looks after everything you just have to cut into it.
"I love making something very beautiful also humble taking topiary box hedging then filling it with plants that tone down that pompous elaborate feel," Jonathan said.
Take planting vegetables as an example.
"You can say to people, well, we do eat the stuff and by making it usable you are knocking that kind of pretentiousness out of gardening."
It was by watching those unpretentious folk, the flocks of Tuscan farmers, that he saw how to grow meadows. Observing how the farmers removed weeds, he saw the key to meadow proliferation.
"I rotivate the soil in a very similar way that the farmers rotivate it to keep the weeds down but what they don't realise is that they are creating the perfect system for corn cockle and a host of other species, corn flowers and the many orchids that are already there.
"A poppy seed is capable of waiting for forty years, so I took the process from what the farmers did and turned it on its head.
"They are doing all this ploughing, constantly ploughing, desperately trying to kill off all the weeds and all I am seeing is beautiful picture postcards of fields of poppies and wild mustard.
"So I thought there must be a way of refining it and my system Ecologica is based upon this with gravel gardens and germination using the correct moon and the right season."
When every seed bursts into life including milk thistles, Jonathan grows wild flower plugs until the unwelcome thistles become obsolete. Typically aware and principled Jonathan tries to use natural ways but would use a weed killer if necessary. There are limits.
"I would never use slug pellets. Slugs are such an important part of the ecosystem the larvae of glow flies eat slugs and they are diminishing in England," he said.
Ecology aside, there are more arguments for Jonathan's style of gardening than the moral one and this has won him some successes, especially where he works. He has broken through years of tradition to change a Renaissance garden.
"The countess at Palazzo Cervini hated the idea of gravel gardens, for example, but once they got round the fact that you are saving so much maintenance and you can walk around immediately after a storm and your feet will be totally clean they were interested.
"Also they realised that there is not much watering to do as it waters itself at night with condensation if you use the right gravel so now they thank me for it,” Jonathan said.
Living on the countess's estate Jonthan is not exactly living a luxury lifestyle even while his studio is in the 500 yr old three storey hermitage, worth several million pounds.
The countryside lifestyle is a hand-to-mouth existence he said. Inspiring as his ideas are, challenging the status-quo is risky.
Jokingly his mother told him if he goes ahead and publishes his second book he could end up in the Tower of London.
But if he is looking out of the Tower's windows, far from his Renaissance home, he will definitely have his work cut out persuading people to replant their perfect English lawns.
Win a copy of Jonathan's book, A Green Existence, in an ever so easy competition.
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