A Renaissance Villa with spectacular views over Florence with biodiverse, sustainable and disease-resistant planting, and new design in keeping with the historical setting. Along the street is a mixed hedge for biodiversity and year-round interest. Offsetting the hedge of the renovated pool area is a drought-tolerant mixed herbaceous and shrub border, with rich summer colour and scent. The adjacent seating area is shaded by roof-trained trees for a living formal structure, and overlooks a new potager, a decorative vegetable garden flanked by candelabra-trained fruit trees, enclosed by a myrtle hedge.
In the walled 19th century Rose garden a custom-made pergola echoes the curves of the Duomo. A semicircle of Osmanthus aquifolium, with fragrant flowers, retraces a vanished hedge, and is linked to the rose pergola by a geometric lawn and low hedging. Ilex crenata is employed as an alternative to box hedging, which blight and other pathogens are making unsustainable in all formal gardens.