The Himalayan Cedar of Villa Piccinelli

The merchants who owned this garden brought plants back from Asia, Africa and the Americas, and built a Moroccan style greenhouse in 1860 to keep the fragile ones alive. The Himalayan cedar never needed it. It came from mountain forest that gets snow, so it took to the high bank above the Serio river without help, and is now 30 metres tall with a trunk 465 centimetres round, the largest tree in the park. Deodar is the timber cedar of the western Himalaya, cut for temples in India because the wood does not rot, and it reached European gardens only in the 1830s, which puts a hard upper limit on how old any specimen on this continent can be. The eighteenth century villa was built by the Piccinelli family on trading money; the council owns the grounds now and runs them as a free public park, with the old greenhouse still standing as a garden pavilion and used for occasional exhibitions. No age is recorded for the tree anywhere we could find, only the measurements. Parco Piccinelli is in Seriate, about four kilometres from central Bergamo and ten to fifteen minutes by bus, so this is a short trip out rather than a stop on a city walk. The grove of pagoda trees a few minutes away in the same park is the other reason to make it.