The Washingtonia Palms of the National Garden Entrance

Everyone will tell you Queen Amalia planted these palms herself. The dates do not allow it. Amalia laid out the National Garden between 1838 and 1840, pulling in plants from wherever she could reach, and she was deposed and left Greece for good in 1862. The California fan palm, Washingtonia filifera, did not reach European cultivation until seed arrived at a Belgian nursery around 1876, and the genus was not formally named until 1879, from those Belgian grown plants. That is fourteen years after her exile at the earliest. So the row almost certainly went in later, once the species could be had at all, and her name attached itself the way a founder's name attaches to everything in a garden she founded. None of which makes the palms less worth walking to. Twelve of them, around 25 metres tall, stand in line at the garden's central gate on Vasilissis Amalias Avenue, bare trunked above the traffic of Syntagma, and the European garden heritage network lists them among the garden's defining historic plantings. They are the most photographed planting inside it. Their real age nobody has published: a Washingtonia of that height means many decades of growth, so 100 to 150 years is an honest bracket rather than a measurement. The pin is a documented gate on the correct side of the garden, not a surveyed position on the palms themselves.