Villa Frere Gardens in Malta, as they were in 1930s

John Hookham Frere (1769–1846) was an English diplomat, writer, scholar, and translator. He served as Britain's envoy to Spain and Portugal in the early 1800’s and became well known for his work in both diplomacy and literature. 

John Frere

He studied English, Greek and Latin literature at Eton and Cambridge and was also fluent in Italian, French and Spanish. As Britain's ambassador to Spain during the Napoleonic Wars he became well known for his work in both diplomacy and literature. On 12 September 1816, John Hookham Frere married Elizabeth Jemima Blake aged 46, the former Dowager Countess of Erroll. For a time they lived in Frere’s home, Roylands in England but her tuberculous necessitated a warmer climate so Frere moved with his wife to Malta in 1821. 

Elizabeth Jemima Blake had married George Hay, in 1790 aged 20, 16th Earl of Erroll becoming Countess of Erroll but by the age of 28 she was widowed with no children. However, in Malta, John and Elizabeth adopted a four-year-old girl called Statyra, a Greek child orphaned during the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829), and raised her as their daughter at Villa Frère.

Statyra

Typical of Frere’s linguistic ability during his stay in Malta he would go on to learn Maltese and Hebrew! He created Villa Frere in Pietà and designed extensive gardens in the English landscape style but adapted to Malta's climate and terrain. Elizabeth died in Malta on 17 January 1831 after ten years of happy life on the island. One reason Villa Frère is such a poignant place is, following her death, Frere ensured the garden became a memorial landscape dedicated to his beloved wife. Indeed, he deliberately carefully planned clear views from the garden towards the spot where Elizabeth was buried in Msida Bastion Cemetery. In the following fifteen years of his life, he never remarried and instead worked on improving the garden in an act of devotion to his wife. 

They became one of the most celebrated gardens on the island appearing in the Magazine Country life in 5th July 1930. The following photos are AI colour generated from the original black and white photos in that issue) and give a glimpse of the beauty of the garden.

The villa attracted many distinguished visitors, including the novelist Benjamin Disraeli. Frere also had strong links with leading literary figures such as Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

Mikiel Anton Vassalli (often called The Father of Maltese language) was one of the most significant friendships in John Hookham Frere's Maltese life. Frere actively helped Vassalli secure a position at the University of Malta as the first Professor of Maltese and Vassali would go on to publish important works on Maltese grammar, proverbs and language studies.

While creating the upper gardens in 1839, workers employed by John Hookham Frere uncovered a natural sinkhole hidden beneath the rocky ground. It was about 19 metres (70 feet) deep, reaching almost to sea level. 

It had become filled with clay and debris over many centuries but Frere had it excavated and cleared. Instead of simply leaving the sinkhole exposed, Frere did something extraordinary: he cut through the rock, which allowed visitors to walk into and view the sinkhole from inside. The tunnel had cleverly turned the geological feature into a romantic garden attraction. 

There were also several Queens who were known to have visited the Villa Frere gardens in Malta. It is possible that Queen Adelaide (1838–1839) visited in Frere’s time at the villa. Queen Mary (1912) and Queen Marie of Romania (1924) were later visitors. 

Queen Marie would, after her visit, design her own gardens around Balchik Palace in Bulgaria obviously inspired by what she saw in these gardens.  

The gardens are maze like with corners with benches and chairs to sit in the shade and wonderful vistas everywhere.

Part of the beauty of the garden is its many levels that have been cut into the slope and the myriad of paths that allow you wander into each corner.

The charming spontaneity of the place constantly surprises and the range of plants, trees and flowers constantly stimulates.

The many stone staircases beckon you forward to another level to explore.

During World War II the estate suffered minor bomb damage, and later much of the garden was lost due to the expansion of St Luke's Hospital, helicopter landing site and nearby school buildings. As a result, the gardens are one third of the size they used to be and Frere Villa itself in a state of decay. Fortunately, thoughtful restoration work is now being carried out by Heritage Malta and the Friends of Villa Frère and its beauty is even now quite stunning. The photos below are from an outing today Sun 14th June 2026 and indicate what still remains of this garden.

The little summer house has already been repaired and has an audio visual presentation on the history of the Villa Frere and its gardens.

This video shows the summer house and the courtyard. 

The gardens are open one day a month usually the first Sunday of each month and the guides are abundant, polite and friendly.  It costs 5 Euros to enter they provide lovely live harp music as you wander around. I highly recommend it. Please don't expect the Country Life version as you will be disappointed. But if you come to explore and enjoy thoughtful restoration by a great team you will gain insights on a place and person that should be celebrated.

Beautiful gardens in Malta have suffered

Over ten years ago, I visited San Anton Palace in Malta and wrote a piece about its connection with Queen Marie of Romania and how she spent her happy teenage years there. Her father was Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh (son of Queen Victoria), and her mother was Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia (daughter of Tsar Alexander II). (See link: san-anton-palace-and-romanov-connection

I thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful gardens surrounding the palace. You might also recognise the gardens from Game of Thrones, in the memorable scene where the despicable Joffrey took Sansa Stark to see her father's head on a spike. That scene was filmed in San Anton Gardens.

In those days, visitors could not only enjoy the gardens but also walk through parts of the palace and visit the kitchen gardens behind it. There was a petting zoo, an immense children's playground, and a huge café that was very reasonably priced, with lovely seating both indoors and outdoors.

This month I returned to enjoy the gardens' quiet beauty and perhaps a coffee, only to find that they had been allowed to deteriorate. Stone paths were breaking up beneath my feet, all the turtles had disappeared from the lovely pond, and signs of neglect were evident everywhere. 

The palace was closed to the public, as were the kitchen gardens, their grounds, and the café. It has remained closed since August 2024 for extensive refurbishment and restoration works, with no confirmed reopening date.

Today I revisited another old favourite of mine, Sa Maison Gardens on the Floriana Bastions. (See my blog post: sa-maison-gardens-remembering-lady.html) Sadly, this beautiful garden was also in disarray. It has been fenced off since last year because of structural restoration works on the eighteenth-century bastion walls and the conversion of the grounds into new shaded and coastal botanical zones.

It saddens me to think of the loss of all those lovely trees and plants that had a history stretching back to Lady Lockwood's time in the 1840s. For some reason, the lemons from the main trees had an extraordinary fragrance; when scratched, they released a scent reminiscent of the most expensive men's cologne.

I know that Malta faces a constant challenge in maintaining and repairing its vast stock of historic buildings and landscapes. There is so much beauty and history that requires care, nurturing, and investment. However, sometimes when we fix things, we do not preserve them—we destroy them. Clearly, investment continues to be made. It is also clear where the priorities lie, and sadly, historic gardens seem to rank rather low on the list.

City Gate / Parliament / Opera House  €100 million

Fort St Elmo                                          €15.5 million

Fort St Angelo                                  €13.4 million

Marina di Valletta                                  €7.5 million

St Elmo Breakwater Bridge                  €2.8 million

One can only hope that when both these gardens eventually reopen, they will still retain some of the character, charm, and living history that made them such special places in the first place.

Consider the flowers of a garden: though differing in kind, colour, form and shape,.. this diversity increaseth their charm, and addeth unto their beauty.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá

Who was this intruder on my boat?

I was wandering along the sea front in Sliema when I spotted my boat in the marina with all it hatches open! Obviously some rogue was on board! I was furious who was on my yacht Lotus eater? It suddenly became apparent to me that all the years of walking through this marina admiring this particular yacht,  had gradually created a false sense of ownership in me. I laughed but have to admit a lingering resentment. 

Isn’t it strange how the brain can play tricks on you. There was me thinking I was merely admiring the beauty and her lines but slowly a very odd sense of ownership had obviously developed. I do admire boats especially beautiful ones like this. But I am no fool, I had a landlord in The Isle of Wight who owned three 10-20m long wooden yachts and I knew that their upkeep relied on him being a full time shipwright working non-stop to maintain them. If you don’t have those skills you would soon become bankrupt trying to maintain even one of these beauties.

I tried to find out who the owner was, but with little success. Apparently it used to belong to John Paul a rather shady millionaire businessman who originally had property in Soho and links with criminals. In the 1970s, he was one of the first developers on Camino. His ex-wife had been shot in Essex and although two thugs were found guilty of her murder they refused to say who had paid them for the killing. The British government wanted him extradited but the Maltese authorities refused. 

The strange thing is whenever I tried to find out who owns it now I came up with a blank. Probably some corporation or other. There are some strange names to boats along the marina. For example one is called Lucky Guy. Given that the owner is involved in betting companies it probably vaguely appropriate but really annoying. Even more irritating is a huge motor cruiser called Loose Change. Now that is just too smug!

Further along the coast towards Valetta there is another ship. It was originally called Black Opal and later renamed The Black Pearl in Malta. The ship was built in Pukavik, Sweden, in 1909 as a wooden trading schooner designed for Baltic cargo work and harsh northern waters. It had a double-layered oak hull to survive Baltic ice conditions and was about 150 feet long with three tall masts. Originally it carried cargoes like: timber, coal, and grain around Scandinavia. 

What happened afterward is almost implausible: The Black Pearl sailed toward Australia as a luxury vessel, but suffered hull problems, and caught fire near the Suez Canal. Following that it sank in Malta and was salvaged from 70ft deep water and went on to appear in the Popeye movie starring Robin Williams.  Weirdly, it sank again then was permanently restored ashore at Ta’ Xbiex as a restaurant. For years the schooner has sat perched beside the marina at Ta’ Xbiex and has become a landmark restaurant/pub/event venue with views over Valletta harbour.

There is rumoured to be a connection between the Black Pearl and the famous actor Erol Flynn however these are not substantiated by solid facts. After all he owned his own schooner the Zaca shown below, another beautiful ship.  

"Strong ships are not conquered by the sea; they ride the waves! Now be a strong ship, not a battered one." 

'Abdu'l-Bahá

My Precious!

Shall I confess my weaknesses? How often they lie hidden, even from ourselves — especially from ourselves. Then, at certain moments, they reveal themselves with startling clarity. Moving house is one such moment, particularly when the move is abroad. Suddenly, painful decisions must be made. Do you pack this? Give it to a charity shop? Pass it on to a friend? Or simply throw it away? The pressure of time only sharpens the difficulty of every choice.

At such moments, we are forced to confront our own peculiar attachments — our little fetishes. Mine are notebooks, pens, and anything remotely connected to calligraphy. Even when my drawers and suitcases are already overflowing, I still linger longingly in stationery shops, tempted to buy more. Pens and pencils seem to call out to me irresistibly. Never mind that I already own a vast collection of fountain pens, complete with cartridges in every imaginable colour, alongside pencils ranging from soft 2B to velvety 6B. I buy ballpoint pens too, usually with an ultra-fine 0.35 mm tip. Once, I even bought a heavy rotary pencil simply because I loved its look and weight, only to spend weeks scouring the internet for the rare oversized 2B lead it required.

Another, perhaps more alarming, obsession is toiletries — anything connected with showering, shampooing, lotions, or potions. Every house I have ever left has contained at least three large crates filled with such things. I seem to accumulate them with effortless speed. Still, on the bright side, I have little interest in clothes, shoes, or handbags, so perhaps some restraint remains.

By now, you are probably thinking of your own particular guilty obsession. You know exactly where to buy it, which make you prefer, and how oddly reassuring it feels simply to have it close at hand. Like the wheels on a suitcase, these obsessions keep us moving forward. They comfort us in ways only we fully understand. When preparing for a major move, we mentally clear space so that the things that truly ring our bells can be given pride of place.

Letting go of possessions is painful, though often necessary. Yet certain objects cling stubbornly to our fingers, transforming us momentarily into Gollum — that wretched creature from The Lord of the Rings — clutching our treasures and hissing defensively, “My precious, my precious!”

Birdsong, seedlings, hammered into something by life

 

When did I begin to notice birdsong?

Or pause in quiet wonder as a tender seedling lifts itself from the dark earth into the light?

Now the beauty of nature can suddenly bring tears to my eyes.

Perhaps it is because, with age, one has witnessed so much sorrow and heartache that the spirit itself becomes softened and worn thin by life. 

Beaten and hammered on both sides until it grows almost translucent.

So delicate that even the song of a bird can pass straight through it and touch the very core of the soul.

The Dangers of Laughing gas

I used to work in a highly specialised, controlled environment designed to manufacture semiconductor devices and integrated circuits on the tenth floor of the Ashby Building at Queen’s University Belfast. It was a clean laboratory where continuous filtration achieved 99.99% efficiency in removing even the smallest particles.

The air we breathe is a precise mixture of gases:

Nitrogen 78%, Oxygen 21%, Argon and trace gases 1%, and Carbon dioxide 0.04%.

On one occasion, an alarm sounded to warn that oxygen levels in the lab had risen too high, and we were instructed to evacuate until they returned to normal. It served as a powerful reminder of how vital—and how finely balanced—this mixture is for life. Disturbing it, even slightly, can have serious consequences.  So imagine my surprise when, this morning, I found something quite different on the doorstep of my apartment block, left out with the usual rubbish for collection.

There were around six blue canisters labelled Miami Magic—nitrous oxide. While commonly used for whipping cream, it is increasingly misused by young people for recreational purposes. I doubted anyone needed to whip that much cream and wondered who was using this substance here in Malta.

Nitrous oxide is now considered the third most commonly used drug among 16–24-year-olds in the UK, after cannabis and cocaine. Other surveys suggest that between 10% and 20% of teenagers and young adults in some European regions have tried it at least once. A global survey in 2021 estimated that nearly 24% of people aged 16–24 had used it. In the United States, poison centres recorded a 1,332% increase in annual cases of nitrous oxide poisoning over a 20-year period, with a particularly sharp rise from around 2023.

How it is used recreationally

Typically, the gas is released from the canister into a balloon—direct inhalation from the canister is dangerous due to the pressure and extreme cold. The user then inhales the gas from the balloon to experience its effects. In some places, young people pay around five euros for two balloons. As always, where there is demand, there are those willing to profit from it. Recent local reports have highlighted the growing use of this gas among young people in Gozo.

The Effects

Often called “laughing gas,” the effects are almost immediate but short-lived, lasting only a minute or two. They include light-headedness, euphoria, giggling, and altered perception. Because the effect is so brief, users often repeat the process multiple times in a session, increasing the risks. The name itself tends to downplay the seriousness of the substance.

Immediate risks

Nitrous oxide reduces oxygen availability in the body, which can lead to fainting, loss of consciousness, or, in extreme cases, death. The gas is stored under pressure and expands rapidly, which can cause cold burns—freezing the skin, lips, or throat if inhaled improperly. It can also affect heart and breathing function, particularly when combined with alcohol or other drugs.

With repeated or heavy use

Nitrous oxide interferes with vitamin B12, leading to deficiency. This can cause nerve damage, resulting in numbness, tingling, weakness, and difficulty walking. In severe cases, it may lead to long-term damage to the spinal cord or brain. Mental health may also be affected, with symptoms such as mood changes, confusion, and cognitive impairment. Some studies indicate that damage can develop within weeks or months of repeated use.

In response to these risks, governments are increasingly taking action. Malta has now officially banned the recreational use of nitrous oxide as of Wednesday, 29 April 2026. It is hoped that this measure will help reduce its use and prevent the harm it can cause—particularly among the young.

Chinese Empress Wu Zeitian's lost gold plea for forgiveness in 700AD found after 1300 years

There was only ever one woman who ruled in her own right as a Chinese empress in the entire history of that land. Her name was Wu Zetian, and her reign lasted from 690 to 705 AD.

She entered the imperial palace as a relatively unimportant fifth-rank concubine, but over time she rose in influence until she came to govern the entire empire. She did much to promote Buddhism in China; for example, the famous Longmen Grottoes bear witness to this patronage.

To reach such heights of power, she had to eliminate many rivals. She was known to be ruthless, even toward family, friends, and foes alike. According to one account, she smothered her newborn daughter and accused Empress Wang and Consort Xiao of the crime; both women were subsequently executed. With these key figures removed, her ascent to supreme power was swift.

In her seventy-seventh year, seeking forgiveness for the wrongs she believed she had committed, she had a golden tablet made—36.2 cm long and composed of 96% gold—inscribed with words including:

"I ask that my sins be forgiven and beg that my wrongs be erased."

This tablet was cast into a crevice on Mount Song in Henan Province around the year 700 AD. It remained hidden and lost for some 1,300 years until it was discovered by a farmer gathering herbs in 1997.

"With fire We test the gold, and with gold We test Our servants"

Bahá’í writings