Mateu Morro’s garden, Santa María

Published by

Seán A. O’Hara

on

22 October, 2018

While attending the Mediterranean Garden Society 2018 Pre-Tour in Mallorca, Spain, we were treated to this plantsman’s garden. Here is what the tour organizer said about this visit:

Mateu lives and gardens in his grandparents´ farm outside the inland village of Santa Maria. Farming and gardening are in the blood. Mateu runs the nursery that his father started decades ago, his brother works with him as a garden designer, and his sister has a propagation nursery across the street. All are passionate about plants, but none so more than Mateu, whose knowledge is encyclopaedic. This is not so much a garden as a plant collection. Thousands of specimens from all over the world compete for space in this delightful place, overlooked by the Tramuntana mountains, and basking in full sunshine. Every year Mateu travels on plant hunting expeditions to Chile, Brazil, South Africa. …

Mateu, at left, with his siblings and their mother,
all of whom are involved in their nursery, Vivers Santa María

Reading the brief story of this family run nursery outlining the evolution of their current enterprise (see ‘Quienes Somos’, or ‘Who We Are’ on their website), I noted the following about Mateu:

Mateu, he has always been passionate about nature and has an innate gift for discovering and recording new plants. Already very, very small, he would go to his neighbors’ house looking at everything they had in the yard to find out what each plant was …

As we arrived at the garden, many of us were ready to be impressed, and we were not disappointed. While going through my photos, I realized how few I had of this extensive collection of plants! My wife reminded me that when I wasn’t walking around with my mouth open in amazement, I was being asked to identify various plants by other attendees. The latter is not unusual during these events – once I identify a few plants other people now know who to ask. But as many of these plants were new to me, I often found myself scratching my head along with them!

Here are some of the more protected plantings areas …

And there were a number of more exposed plantings of which I find I have only a few shots:

Mateu was on hand to answer the hundreds of questions about his plants and his methods of growing them. Eventually I was able to ask him a few myself and restricted them to the most important as we were already running out of time by then. I am sure that many of us would have enjoyed spending an entire day with Mateu in his garden – he was indeed very knowledgeable about such a wide variety of different plant types and the far-flung places from which he collected them!

Vivers Santa María is actually quite an impressive operation. Mallorcans are fortunate to have such a wide variety of locally grown plants available to them, most of which are better adapted to the rigors of the local climate than imported plants from Northern Europe.