The Atlas Cedar of Villa delle Rose

Five metres forty-five around the trunk, thirty-two metres tall, and it grows in the garden of an art gallery. Villa delle Rose stands on Via Saragozza, the long road running out of the city towards the portico that climbs to San Luca, and the villa is now one of the two homes of Bologna's Galleria d'Arte Moderna. Its gardens are free to walk into, but they keep the gallery's hours rather than a park's, so this is a tree with an opening time. The cedar is the largest thing in them. Cedrus atlantica comes from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria, cold forest on thin soil above a thousand metres, where the remaining stands are shrinking and the species is now listed as endangered in its own range. In a walled Bolognese garden it has had none of that difficulty, and the size shows. It carries the flat, slightly ascending plates of foliage that a cedar only makes when it has been given room, so the crown reads as a stack of dark tiers. Nothing dates it. The national monumental tree register carries the girth and the height and no age at all, and no second source names it, so the honest answer is that it is large enough to be protected and nobody has published a number. Bologna's two other registered cedars are both deodars, up on the hills south of the centre. This one you can reach on a bus.