The Ombu of Piazza Umberto I

Saving one of Bari's four officially monumental trees has been costed at around a thousand euros, and the money has not been spent. The tree is an ombu, it stands in the gardens of Piazza Umberto I five minutes from the central station, and it leans. It leans because it has spent years reaching for light past the holm oaks around it, and because the asphalt laid up to its base has damaged the plate of roots underneath. A local civic association put all of that in a letter to the mayor asking for a modest repair job. The species is stranger than the tree looks. Phytolacca dioica is not a tree in the botanical sense but an outsized herb from the South American pampas, its trunk swollen with water storing tissue rather than timber, which is why nobody can date one by counting rings. Italy imported it in the middle of the 19th century as an ornamental curiosity, and almost none of those imports ever reached this size. This one is 2.5 metres around and about six metres tall, low and heavy and grey, and both the Puglia and the national registers list it as monumental on those measurements. Its age is a guess by its own defenders, whose letter says it was probably planted in the 1950s. Nobody has put a firmer date on it. If you know one, tell us.