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The road up into the mountains from Kingston is not built for speed , but no one seems to have told the driver . As the car hurtle around hairpin turn , the countryside fly by in a blur . It ’s only when we stop at a switchback to rent a motortruck barrel past that I see the hillside are line with small plantations .
usurious and winding as it is , this road has been well travel for C , the farmers descending with loads of coffee bean , mango , bananas , and potatoes pass Kingstonians on their way up to escape the heat of summer . My own mission is fairly different : to inquire Strawberry Hill , a new inn that promises more than the formulaic two - palm - trees - and - a - hammock hangout landscape .
If not for the elusive club of the entry garden ’s palms , croton , and ferns , it might be hard to tell where wild ends and landscape gardening begins . '' We ’ve made the garden run into the skirmish , '' says horticulturist - in - residence Jonathan Surtees , who recognise me dressed for both . Here the plantings are so dense and rich that the persuasion from my porch overlooking the hillside is a bulwark of green splash with ruddy and yellow . But gradually , as my oculus adjust , I recognize the red ' cherries ' of coffee berry tree diagram hang within reach , and the clusters of palms , ferns , and bananas in the space - all reminders of Strawberry Hill ’s past .
A workings grove since the 1700s , Strawberry Hill was advert for the English estate of Horace Walpole to whom , fable has it , the land was once deeded . The property was planted with deep brown , bananas , and mango for meal in the Great House , which , by the forties , had become a guest household fete for Sunday tea in its secret botanical garden . euphony mogul Chris Blackwell , founder of Island Records , attended those teas with his parents as a child , and grease one’s palms the prop in 1972 to expend as a secret retreat : This is where reggae queen ( and Island artist ) Bob Marley recovered from a gunshot combat injury in 1976 . But it was n’t until after Hurricane Gilbert flattened the Great House in 1988 that Blackwell began rebuilding Strawberry Hill as a resort : a fresh Great House and ten 19th century - style cottages perch on the hillside and tucked into tropic thickets , each with its own unique landscape .
'' Chris Blackwell has a affair about preservation , '' Surtees explains . '' If anyone chop down a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , he ’s fail . '' So the present flows into the past as the industrial plant wind up down the hillside , and the tame portmanteau word into the wild . The gardens knead on levels that are n’t obvious at first . Unlike the schematic garden of Surtees ’s native Britain , '' the undecomposed tropical garden are n’t meant to be taken in at a glance , '' he says . '' They should be find . ''
At 3,000 base , Strawberry Hill straddle the border between temperate and tropic rainfall forest . The location enabled Hawaiian landscape painting designer Stephen Haus to squeeze several growing zones - worth of plants into a mere 6 acre . Now , in just an afternoon , Surtees and I research the diverse botany of the whole island , from teetotal lowland to rain down timber to alpine plain . Star Malus pumila , ackee , and lychee trees develop on a rooftree above the entry . The lower cottages , surrounded by arching Washingtonia palms and heliconias , with their full , paddle - form leave and fiery flower bract , have a close , dark , tropic feeling . But as we walk up the Benny Hill , the garden capable to the sunlight and become shiny with flower jatropha tree diagram , lantana , and plumeria . All around the Great House , flowering vines ( jade vine , thunbergia , and bougainvillea ) add semblance and height . Then , at the crest of the Alfred Hawthorne , the dense ontogenesis gives elbow room to airy tree ferns with woolly prehistoric fronds , to datura , agapanthus , and daylily . Even that ubiquitous parking lot filler , impatiens , seems at home here ( I later find these Caribbean native growing wild in hillside umber plantations ) .
" Haus created a residue with the material that was already in place , '' Surtees says '' Then he added touches of color here and there . '' His hand was guided by the heritage of the island : red-faced cordyline , for example , had been used for centuries as a boundary marking for demesne in Jamaica . Here it flows in a aristocratical curvature down the hillside between two bungalow , standing out against an underplanting of ash gray - pass on aglaonema .
A rhythm runs through these garden , with bananas , heliconias , and stands of fragrant ginger repeating a tropic chorus . Broad bands of croton and anthurium echo from one bungalow to the next , laying down a meter that pulls the divergent garden together . Blending geography and climate with chronicle and custom , they address the dialect of the island .
'' My stave of six and I are busy pick up and preserving material from the quondam garden , '' Surtees explains . '' Importing other tropic plants , creating an island of rarefied specimens , hoping to make them common . We ’re condense with local cultivator to propagate landscape painting plant and grow fruits and vegetables for the restaurant . We have the base for a very exciting garden . ''
It ’s a long way from the manicured imitation - tropical landscape gardening of most resort . Nor is it an undivided museum of ' natives only . ' Mixing naturalize specie like ackee , introduce to the island by Captain Bligh , with aboriginal spathodea and orchids , the garden is Jamaica . Like the reggae medicine that rises up from Kingston , it is a rhythmic meeting of styles , spell and native , woven together with a feeling of pridefulness of place .
