The Spino di Giuda of Giardini Pubblici

Italians call this species spino di Giuda, Judas's thorn, and the local name for this particular tree sometimes adds inerme: thornless. That is the joke of it. A wild Gleditsia triacanthos defends itself with branched spines that grow in bunches straight out of the trunk, long enough to go through a boot. The form planted in parks has had them bred out. It is the third of the three Giardini Pubblici trees Cagliari's council put onto the Sardinian regional list of monumental trees in November 2021, alongside the pair of Moreton Bay figs a short walk away, and by some distance the least obvious of them. The national register measured its trunk at 2.94 metres round in 2020 and nobody has taped it since. No source gives it a documented age; the figures that circulate for the park's protected trees put it somewhere over a century, and that is as close as the record comes. Honey locust is a tree of central North America and it does not look like the figs at all. The leaves are pinnate and small enough to read as ferns from underneath, they come late and go early, and the seed pods are long, dark and twisted, hanging in the crown well after the leaves have gone.