Missoni has always been a fanatic for colors, and in the garden she disappears into a thicket of high-stemmed blue hydrangeas to pick a particularly purple bloom for her bouquet. Dropping it into her wicker basket, she heads to her second vegetable plot, this one full of chicory, mint, San Marzano tomatoes and long-fingered zucchini plants — their sunny blossoms in full glory after the earlier morning rain. Missoni squats in the wet earth and snips off a few for the day’s lunch, depositing the harvest in her wicker basket before cutting a handful of rosemary branches and waving their piney perfume under my nose. “For our little pizzas,” she says. “A house specialty.”

As a child, Missoni was scrawny and sickly. Her parents sent her to a school “with a marvelous garden” on the Ligurian coast where she grew robust on the sea air and a diet of fish. The experience seems to have worked — she is as energetic and spry as one could hope to be at any age. Missoni brags about scuba diving for shellfish (“It’s my passion,” she says. “That’s why I have such good lungs and can climb mountains at 85.”) and is tireless in our two-hour tour of the sprawling garden. But her delicate childhood also intimately acquainted her with fashion — kept inside in her youngest days, Missoni passed the time at her grandparents’ factory by making paper dolls from the atelier’s international style magazines. “There among the fabric and the patterns, I learned all about ‘30s fashion, cutting it out in silhouettes,” she says. It was the beginning of a lifelong calling.