Underground Beauty
by Judie Najarian
Summer
heat. Blistering, unrelenting. There is a sanctuary underground in California,
a place where one can escape the sizzling summer heat and the sounds of
a noisy world passing by. This peaceful place was carved by hand from
the earth, the simple vision of a man who missed the moderate climate
of his homeland in Italy. With a natural bent for horticulture, Baldasare
Forestiere, a Sicilian immigrant to America, arrived in the central valley
town of Fresno,
California, in the early 1900’s.
Open, flat farmland spread for miles around Fresno, enticing Forestiere with the promise of one day owning his own robust, income-producing vineyard. He had another dream as well: to bring a bride from his homeland, and have a family.
Forestiere
found a 10-acre parcel just west of the city and began to prepare the
land. This was not ordinary farmland. Just inches below the surface, he
struck rock -- bedrock, known as hardpan, the scourge of the valley and
of anyone who tried to farm the land. In some places the hardpan was at
least 15 inches thick! How would he ever get water to the roots of his
vines?
The summer heat exhausted him and each day he longed for the cool night air. Day-by-day he worked to cultivate his land, but always the hardpan was there to slow his progress. He wondered how deep he would have to dig before he found soft earth again. And so it began. With only his hand tools, Forestiere began to open the earth below the hardpan until, at last, he had created a room … a cool place to retreat from the summer sun.
Fascinated with his accomplishment underground, Forestiere decided he would add another room to his home beneath the earth. For the next forty years, Baldasare Forestiere continued to dig and shape his new home, escaping to his private underworld from the heat of day in the San Joaquin Valley and from the bone-chilling winter cold.
Room by room and corridor by corridor, he continued to dig, creating a subterranean world without a building permit or even blueprints to follow. Driven by his own creative instinct, an aesthetic sense of design and self-taught engineering genius, he fashioned his grottos and caverns as if he were a master Roman architect.
He
built columns and arches and domes of hardpan. He held the thick native
rock in place with cement and scraps of metal that he used for sturdy,
load-bearing structural headers. Some ceilings he inverted, like teacups,
vaulting them as if each were its own cathedral. He opened some of the
ceilings to the sky and dressed them with skylights or redwood arbors
and pergolas where lush grapevines, although planted below the earth,
would cascade down from up above
the “roof.”
A practical man, Forestiere understood the air currents, and created small openings and passageways to move the air. He developed an “early warning system” for visitors -- he could stand below and see and hear their footsteps as they descended to the entrance to his home, giving him just enough time to put on a shirt and comb his dusty hair.
Many of the trees and plants that he planted still stand and thrive today. Citrus trees: Grapefruit, Orange, Lemon and Tangerine, Almond and Avocado trees, Pomegranate trees and Italian and Bartlett Pear trees, Olive trees, Persimmon, Loquat, Quince, even Carob, and the rare Jujube --all were touched with his green thumbs and gardening expertise. There were Arbutus, Black Fig trees, Kumquat, Date Palms and the common Mulberry too. Some of the trees were planted 22 feet below the surface of the ground -- he created holes above them to let in the sun and capture the rain. He built retaining walls around each, to hold the precious moisture that would fall from an opening in the earthen, hardpan hole above.
Patios and garden courts circle the underground home. Like a maze, paths connect and meander, creating almost secret passageways and then, surprisingly, opening to large promenades. Forestiere imagined an underground restaurant and began to dig an auto tunnel approximately 800 feet long, with enough room for two Model T’s to park side-by-side. The tunnel actually winds through the gardens and ends in a large subterranean room that would delight even the most fastidious diner. Never completed, only the dream remains.
There
are passageways and steps to lower levels edged with planters, both large
and small. Some have built-in recessed seats made of hardpan stones and
cement mortar.
Some of the living areas have skylights that were covered in the winter with glass to keep out the rain. This brilliant earth architect used random skylights to allow in the natural light of day.
Forestiere even built a small fishpond! With a hole cut in the earth above and another in the floor below, he set a large piece of glass and sealed it well with cement. Crossing on a small footbridge, he could study the little water creatures, even tropical fish that inhabited his indoor glass-bottomed aquarium. In the room below, he could look up through the glass and see the fish swimming, and then on up to the sky above! He built a garden court next to his kitchen and his summer and winter bedrooms. He even dug a small lake on the land above, at real ground level. After his passing, this lake was filled in for a parking lot.
Baldasare Forestiere died at the age of sixty-seven. He died alone. The bride he had chosen from his homeland could not bear to live in the underground palace that he built for her and she returned to Italy, leaving him to his pick and his shovels and his buckets of dirt.
After his death, the Underground Gardens opened to the public as a museum. It’s a permanent legacy to this talented master of the soil.
Forestiere Underground Gardens
5021 W. Shaw Avenue
Fresno, California
Writer
Judie Najarian lives in Pacific Grove, California.
Her email is 