The Pagoda Trees of Villa Piccinelli

Local press calls this the most renowned of Seriate's seven registered monumental trees, and it is not a tree. The national register lists it as a homogeneous group of pagoda trees, with trunks ranging from 265 to 455 centimetres round and heights up to 35 metres, which means the grove holds both its founders and its successors and no single specimen carries the entry. The pin is approximate for that reason: the register gives a centre point for the group rather than a position for each trunk. It sits in the same municipal park as the Villa Piccinelli cedar, a few minutes' walk away, in Seriate, about four kilometres out from central Bergamo. Despite the name the pagoda tree is Chinese rather than Japanese, planted around temples there long before European gardeners got hold of it in the eighteenth century. Its useful trick is timing. It flowers in August and September, when almost everything else in a northern Italian park has finished, hanging cream panicles over the grass and then dropping them, so the ground under these trees goes pale for a couple of weeks in late summer. Strings of seed pods follow in autumn, shaped like beads on a wire. Seriate has a second registered pagoda tree at Villa Ambiveri, on private ground, which is a different tree and not this one.