The Yew of the Bath of Venus

This yew was already a grown tree when it was carried into the garden, which makes it older than the garden. The Campania register is explicit: the specimen was mature when it was set in place at the creation of the English Garden in the 1790s, and it calls the tree one of the patriarchs of the whole design. That is also why the age field on the same record, which says 150 years, cannot be right, and it is stated here as the disagreement it is. Nearly four metres round the trunk and twenty metres tall, it stands at the Bath of Venus, the grotto at the top of the garden where a Carrara marble Venus by Tommaso Solari, carved in 1762 and installed here around 1840, crouches on a rock above a pool. The Reggia's own description of the place records that the water surrounding the statue rises from the base of a monumental yew. That is this tree. Yew is the slowest-growing timber tree in Europe and among the longest-lived, which is exactly why an eighteenth-century designer would move a mature one rather than plant a sapling and wait. The boulders, the ferns and the ruined cryptoporticus behind it were all built to look accidental. The yew is the only part that is not.