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The route up into the mountains from Kingston is not built for speed , but no one seems to have told the gadget driver . As the car hurtles around hairpin turns , the countryside flies by in a blur . It ’s only when we stop at a switchback to let a truck barrel past that I see the hillside are lined with small plantations .
Steep and winding as it is , this route has been well traveled for centuries , the farmer descending with heaps of coffee beans , mangoes , bananas , and potatoes passing Kingstonians on their way up to get away the heat of summer . My own commission is more or less different : to inquire Strawberry Hill , a new auberge that promise more than the formulaic two - palm tree - tree - and - a - hummock resort landscape .
If not for the subtle order of the debut garden ’s palms , Codiaeum variegatum , and ferns , it might be hard to secernate where wilderness finish and landscaping start . '' We ’ve made the garden encounter the brush , '' says plantsman - in - manse Jonathan Surtees , who greets me dressed for both . Here the plantings are so obtuse and racy that the view from my porch overlook the hillside is a wall of green splashed with red and yellow-bellied . But bit by bit , as my eyes adjust , I recognise the reddened ' cherries ' of coffee trees hang within reach , and the clusters of palms , ferns , and banana in the space - all reminder of Strawberry Hill ’s past .
A working plantation since the 1700s , Strawberry Hill was nominate for the English estate of Horace Walpole to whom , fable has it , the land was once deeded . The holding was planted with coffee , bananas , and mango tree for repast in the Great House , which , by the 1940s , had become a invitee business firm celebrated for Sunday tea in its private botanic garden . Music mogul Chris Blackwell , founder of Island Records , attend those afternoon tea with his parent as a child , and bought the property in 1972 to use as a private retreat : This is where reggae king ( and Island artist ) Bob Marley recuperate from a gunshot combat injury in 1976 . But it was n’t until after Hurricane Gilbert flattened the Great House in 1988 that Blackwell get down rebuilding Strawberry Hill as a resort : a new Great House and ten 19th century - style cottages perch on the hillside and insert into tropical coppice , each with its own unparalleled landscape .
'' Chris Blackwell has a thing about preservation , '' Surtees explains . '' If anyone chops down a tree , he ’s run . '' So the present flows into the yesteryear as the plants wind down the hillside , and the tame blends into the wild . The gardens puzzle out on grade that are n’t obvious at first . Unlike the formal garden of Surtees ’s aboriginal Britain , '' the just tropical garden are n’t intend to be taken in at a glimpse , '' he says . '' They should be discovered . ''
At 3,000 pes , Strawberry Hill straddle the margin between temperate and tropic rain wood . The location enabled Hawaiian landscape architect Stephen Haus to squeeze several growing zone - worth of plants into a mere 6 acre . Now , in just an afternoon , Surtees and I search the various vegetation of the whole island , from dry lowland to rain forest to alpine plain . stellar apple , ackee , and leechee tree come up on a ridge above the entry . The lower cottages , surrounded by arching Washingtonia decoration and heliconias , with their broad , paddle - shaped farewell and fervid flower bract , have a near , glum , tropical feeling . But as we take the air up the hill , the garden open to the sun and become shiny with blooming jatropha trees , lantana , and plumeria . All around the Great House , flowering vines ( jade vine , thunbergia , and bougainvillea ) add people of colour and pinnacle . Then , at the crown of the Alfred Hawthorne , the slow increase gives way to airy tree ferns with woolly prehistoric fronds , to datura , agapanthus , and daylilies . Even that omnipresent parking passel makeweight , impatiens , seems at home here ( I later see these Caribbean indigene growing hazardous in hillside coffee woodlet ) .
" Haus created a balance wheel with the stuff that was already in shoes , '' Surtees says '' Then he added touches of color here and there . '' His hired hand was guided by the inheritance of the island : reddish genus Cordyline , for instance , had been used for C as a boundary marker for estates in Jamaica . Here it flows in a gentle curve down the hillside between two cottages , standing out against an underplanting of silver - leaved aglaonema .
A rhythm runs through these gardens , with bananas , heliconias , and digest of fragrant pep take over a tropic chorus . Broad band of croton and anthurium echo from one cottage to the next , lay down a beat that pulls the diverging gardens together . coalesce geographics and climate with chronicle and tradition , they talk the dialect of the island .
'' My staff of six and I are busybodied collecting and preserving material from the old garden , '' Surtees explains . '' Importing other tropic plants , creating an island of rare specimens , hoping to make them common . We ’re contracting with local growers to propagate landscape plants and grow fruits and vegetable for the eatery . We have the basis for a very exciting garden . ''
It ’s a foresightful way from the manicured false - tropical landscaping of most resorts . Nor is it an exclusive museum of ' natives only . ' Mixing naturalize species like ackee , introduced to the island by Captain Bligh , with native spathodea and orchids , the garden is Jamaica . Like the reggae music that rises up from Kingston , it is a rhythmical confluence of styles , imported and native , weave together with a flavor of pridefulness of seat .
