What's blossoming now in Venice: Easter Week & Early Spring Round-Up
Garden glimpses and our favorite yellow spring blossoms. Nonna's Easter cake, a walk and story about our neighborhood, and rediscovering the spring cakes of the San Zaccaria monastery in Venice.
What’s blossoming in Venice in early April and during the Easter Week: Here’s what you will see in our neighborhood, and the latest glimpses of the garden.
Can you imagine which herb blossoms first in Nonna’s herb garden?
It’s the classic μίνθα = mentha longifolia = mint, and it has tiny purple blossoms. Grandmother’s mints thrive simply everywhere in the garden: Some love the humid corner next to the mimosa tree. Others prefer to live next to the fig tree and a small olive tree. Others chose greyish terracotta pots on the sunny terrace. And another menta aquatica - water mint that should grow in the little water basin, actually “moved” and now lives amongst the dry stone wall on the sun-drenched terrace! And, there will always grow mints in the nursery, next to young geranium and hemp palms.
Mint leaves also go into Easter cakes by means of sciroppo di menta - mint syrup that’s used to flavor the two cakes Nonna likes best during the Easter Week and in April: Crostata di polenta al sapore di menta (a rich mint-flavored polenta cake, sweetened with white cane sugar and mint syrup), plus an orange-blossom flavored fugassa (focaccia) which she used to eat as a child when colomba pasquale, the Italian Easter cake, wasn’t available.
We’ll share the recipe of her mint polenta in a post telling you more about the Greek Orthodox Easter Feast and its culinary traditions here in Venice.
The Easter Week brings many visitors to our neighborhood, and I love to recall a story in which Nonna, exceptionally, showed a visitor around. Incredible how lush everything looks by the first week of April - in my opinion, late March and April are the most colorful months in Venice:
This year on Domenica delle Palme (Palm Saturday) we noticed the first blossoms of the ancient wisteria growing next to a fico d’India on the terrace. And there’s still mimosa blossoms, they will be around for another two weeks at least, until mid-April.
If you have the opportunity to walk around Venice these days, you’ll discover lots of yellow blooming plants in window boxes: These are actually succulents blossoming from late March to early May, very popular here because they are the only ones able to survive those parching days of summer when not even watering the plants three times a day would help.
That’s why you can notice so many window boxes in Venice exposed to the south and overgrown with sedum palmeri, the only plants that “somehow” make it through summer. Right now, their blossoms look lush and bright, what a contrast to those blue and greyish foggy mornings in April.
As the first three months of the year were rather sunny and mild in Venice, wisteria blossoms opened about two weeks earlier than usual. Just like mimosa, the number of glicine (wisteria) in Venice has been growing over the past decade, so in April we’ll dedicate two articles to them.
We’ll soon take you on a virtual wisteria walk around Venice, discovering some of the most lush wisteria plants! Last year, I started a wisteria map, so it’s time to publish it :-)
Another favorite plant now blossoming in the neighborhood is alberi di Giuda - Judas trees: In a few days, they will be in full bloom at the Giardinetti Reali1 next to Piazza San Marco.
As our neighbor says, sedum palmeri, together with Judas trees, violets and wisteria, are the sentori di primavera - a sure sign that spring is finally here to stay in Venice.
Coming in the next post: Discover the story of the forgotten calissoni di San Zaccaria, a special cake that wrote history and that was made for the Doge of Venice exclusively at the San Zaccaria monastery bakery.
Of course, cakes like thes are flavored with garden herbs, mint and calendula blossoms in the case of calissoni, so we’ll show you the lush mint garden in April in another post online soon.
The Giardini Reali are located next to Piazza San Marco. They were restored by the Venice Gardens Foundation after 2013 and reopened in December 2019 - actually a month after the flood that hit Venice in November 2019. For now, click here to read more about their history (in Italian).