The Camphor of San Michele in Bosco

The garden surrounding the Rizzoli hospital splits into two distinct characters, and this camphor grows in the gentler of the two: a western section mixing old oaks, holm oaks, cypresses, lindens and horse chestnuts into something closer to an informal woodland than a designed garden, in contrast to the dense conifer forest of cedars and black pines covering the site's eastern slope. Cinnamomum camphora is native to East Asia and reached Italian institutional gardens through the same 19th century acclimatisation wave that filled Naples, Rome and other cities with newly fashionable evergreen imports, valued for the camphor oil its wood and leaves produce and for a dense, glossy canopy that holds its colour through the Bolognese winter. Its exact planting date is not recorded, folded into the general landscaping the hospital's founders carried out around 1896 rather than documented tree by tree, but it shares the same hillside history as San Michele in Bosco's Himalayan cedar: monastery ground, briefly royal, now medical, with the trees the one constant through every change of use.