The Magical Story of the Heller Garden
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His botanical work was deeply informed by his extensive travels, collecting plant specimens from diverse regions including the Himalayas, the Pyrenees, China, and Lapland. He created an alpine, a rocky landscape that mimicked high-altitude environments to sustain rare mountain plants.
The garden, later named "Elephant Cemetery" by his children, flourished with an impressive variety of flora: towering exotic trees such as conifers, palms, and camphor trees; lush tropical vegetation including banana plants and bamboo; and aquatic plants thriving in the carefully maintained waterways.
His creation combined scientific botanical knowledge with aesthetic landscaping, fostering a unique microclimate that sustained diverse plant species.
During Heller’s tenure in Gardone the garden was often seen as a sanctuary for creatives. Heller would invite artists from across the globe to come and stay and create something specifically for the space. In 1992 Austrian artist Rudoplh Hirt came to visit and rather than stay in the main house, he camped in a tent in the garden for several nights in order to find the perfect spot for his mesmerising “Dio delle Aque”. It wasn’t only visual artists who sought inspiration from the garden, Heller also invited his musician friends like Peter Gabriel and Lou Reed to stay. In fact, Lou spent his sixtieth birthday in the garden and found a sense of pure bliss in his ritual of practicing tai chi every morning in the tranquil environment. There are many anecdotes such as this where the garden becomes transformed by those who live in it, rather than becoming a garden containing artworks, Heller implores us to see the garden as an artwork in itself. The Heller garden is just like life, full of surprises.
The BOTANICAL PASSION
of Arthur Hruska
1903 - 1980
Arthur Hruska, originally trained in dentistry and surgery, pursued studies across Europe and the United States, earning his doctorate in 1906 in Munich and completing further studies in Padua in 1913.
While he made significant contributions to medical fields such as plastic surgery and maxillofacial trauma, his passion extended beyond medicine into botany and landscape design.
In 1903, Hruska began transforming a neglected vineyard of 10,000 square meters in Gardone Riviera, on Lake Garda, into a lush botanical garden. He designed an intricate system of small lakes, streams, and shaded pathways, carefully replicating natural ecosystems.
THE ART INFLUENCE
of André Heller
1988 - 2022
Sadly after Hruska passed the garden fell into a sleeping beauty stadium, much unattended to and it wasn’t until almost eighty years after the garden first began that the Austrian artist André Heller visited. He became spellbound by its beauty. In 1988 he bought the house and garden and decided to transform the space by combining botanical beauty with manmade art. Sprawling over 10,000 square meters the garden and its vegetation has only continued to grow in both size and beauty, now hosting over 3,000 species. Even in 1988, the sheer variety of plants and flowers was so impressive to Heller that he had the brilliant idea to enhance the garden’s natural beauty with the introduction of some complimentary and often confrontational artworks.
CONTINUITY
with the Porsche Family
2022-
Today, over thirty years later the garden has continued to evolve with artworks by some of the most significant names in the Western art historical canon such as Rodin and Renoir, alongside lesser known artists from Tibet, Mongolia and of course, Italy. Most recently Jovanka and Hans Porsche, the current protectors and curators of the garden commissioned the young British sculptor Poppy Field to create a portrait of the garden’s manager, Graziella Belli, to recognise her unmatched contribution to the garden of more than 40 years.