The Dragon Tree of the Orto Botanico
Stampace, Valle di Palabanda
You need a ticket to see this treePaid entry, euro 4 (euro 2 reduced; free for children under 6, disabled visitors and their companion, and university students and staff). Open Tuesday to Sunday and holidays, 9:00 to 18:00 April to October and 9:00 to 14:00 November to March; closed Mondays. Guided visits by booking (minimum 10 people). Hours as printed on the garden's own tariff page, which shows a 2016 update date, so check before travelling.
Cut a dragon tree and it bleeds. The red resin that runs out is what gave Dracaena draco its name and what made the species worth shipping off the Canary Islands for centuries, as a dye, a varnish and a medicine. This one stands near the Department of Botanical Sciences building at the top of Cagliari's botanical garden, and it is an odd thing to meet in Sardinia. Not a conifer and not a palm: a succulent that has worked out the shape of a tree, thickening slowly and dividing its crown into fistfuls of stiff sword-shaped leaves. The older it gets, the more branched and the more particular that crown becomes. Dating one is hard, because a dragon tree lays down none of the annual rings you can count in an oak, and its age is usually read from how often the crown has forked. Here the figure comes from the garden instead. Its own account of its notable trees says they are the oldest specimens on the ground because they were planted during the founding phase, and it names the Dracaena draco in that list beside the ombu and the Moreton Bay fig. The garden opened on 15 November 1866 in the Valle di Palabanda, above Roman cisterns and the site of an amphitheatre, so this dragon tree has had up to about 160 years to build the head it carries now. Nobody has measured its trunk.
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Getting there
Orto Botanico di Cagliari, near the Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita e dell'Ambiente building, Viale Sant'Ignazio da Laconi 1, Cagliari
You can recognise it by the stiff sword-shaped leaves bunched at the ends of thick pale branches, more succulent than tree. It stands near the Department of Botanical Sciences building at the top of the garden.
In central Cagliari; about a 15 minute walk from the Giardini Pubblici cluster (cag_001-003).
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.