The Argan of the Orto Botanico

Italy has exactly one argan tree in a botanical garden, and it grows in Cagliari. Argania sideroxylon is endemic to the semi-arid south of Morocco and is planted almost nowhere in Europe. The Italian parks and gardens association lists this specimen as the only one in any Italian botanical garden. The Italian Botanical Heritage survey goes a step further and calls it probably the only one in any European botanical garden. A University of Bari research record on the species, written about something else entirely, agrees that the Cagliari tree is the only documented argan in the country. So the reason to walk to this one is not age or size. It is that the species has no business being here at all. Argan is the tree behind argan oil, pressed from the kernels inside its fruit, and in its home range goats climb into the branches after them. Everything about it is built for drought: small leathery grey-green leaves, thorny branches, a crown that holds on through months without rain. Cagliari, hot and dry by the standards of anywhere north of it, is close enough to Morocco in climate to keep the tree alive. The garden around it opened on 15 November 1866, on five hectares in the Valle di Palabanda above Punic and Roman cisterns. Nobody has published a planting date, an age or a girth for the argan itself. If you have measured it, or know when it went in, tell us.