The Yew and Laurel Wood of Giardino Giusti

Behind the Giardino Giusti's formal cypress avenue and geometric flowerbeds, the garden turns considerably wilder: a wooded section built from yew and laurel, an evergreen understorey planted to feel more like a natural grove than a designed landscape, leading down to a sixteenth-century grotto styled after the artificial caves fashionable in Renaissance Italian gardens. Taxus baccata is one of the most enduring tree species cultivated in European gardens, capable of living for many centuries and famously difficult to date precisely since its heartwood tends to hollow and rot away long before the tree itself dies, and this wood's older specimens fit that same pattern of a documented presence without a documented age. The grotto they surround was built to let visitors imagine themselves stepping into wilder, mythological terrain after walking through the garden's rigidly geometric front section, a contrast this yew and laurel planting still delivers exactly as designed more than four centuries later, regardless of what has happened to the garden's more famous cypress out front.