What is the oldest tree in Caserta?

The yew at the Bath of Venus, in the English Garden of the Reggia. The regional register says it was already a mature tree when it was set there in the 1790s, so it predates the garden. The Douglas fir and the camphor are each given about 200 years.

Do you have to pay to see them?

Yes. All seven stand inside the English Garden of the Reggia di Caserta, which is covered by the combined Royal Park and English Garden ticket, 9 euro plus a 1 euro online fee. A 3 euro park-only ticket exists but excludes the English Garden. Closed Tuesdays.

Can you walk between them?

Easily, once you are there. Six of the seven sit within about 200 metres of each other in the flat southern part of the English Garden that the royal gardeners called the Palco, and the yew is 500 metres further up. Getting to the garden is the long part: it is roughly 2.5 km from the palace gate along the main axis, or take the electric shuttle.

Which is the strangest?

The sweet osmanthus. The national register credits it with 6.5 metres of trunk; the regional one explains that this is every stem added together, because the species grows as a bundle. In autumn it produces a scent of apricot from flowers a few millimetres wide.

Italy

Ancient Trees in Caserta

Caserta's remarkable trees are all in one place, and it is not the town. In 1786 Maria Carolina had 23 hectares at the top of the royal park turned into the first landscape garden in Italy, and John Andrew Graefer filled it with species nobody in Campania had seen. What survives is a walk of a few hundred metres past a cedar seven and three quarter metres round, a Douglas fir of forty metres, a plane that grew sideways, and a yew that was already old when it was carried in.

The Cedar of the Palco

Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · over 150 years · Giardino Inglese

Seven and three quarter metres around the trunk, and sixteen metres tall. That ratio is the whole story of this cedar: it has spent its life spreading rather than climbing, and no thicker trunk appears anywhere in the national register's entries for Caserta. It stands in the flat southern end of the English Garden, the stretch the royal gardeners called the Palco, which holds more oversized trees per hectare than the rest of the park put together. Cedar of Lebanon reached western Europe in the seventeenth century as a curiosity out of the mountains of Lebanon and Syria, where the species is now down to scattered protected groves after three thousand years of cutting for temples, palaces and ships. In a Campanian garden fed by the Carolino aqueduct it grows faster and wider than it ever would at home, which is what you are looking at. The garden around it was laid out from 1786 by John Andrew Graefer, an English gardener sent over on the recommendation of the Royal Society, for a queen who wanted something less geometric than the rest of the park. Both registers put the tree at over 150 years without being more precise, so it belongs somewhere between the first planting and the Victorian expansion.

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The Plane That Grew Sideways

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · over 150 years · Giardino Inglese, il Palco

This tree is too small to qualify and the register listed it anyway. Campania asks a plane for four metres of trunk before it counts as monumental; this one has two metres sixty and stands nine metres tall, and it got in on the strength of a crown twenty-five metres across. The regional record calls it among the most beautiful and most photographed plants in the English Garden, which is an unusual thing for a government form to say about anything. The branching is what makes it. Instead of one trunk driving upward, the limbs leave low and travel outward in long sinuous curves that cross and interlace, so the tree reads as a wide low room rather than a column, and visitors come to it on purpose. The old royal gardeners knew it as the Indian plane, which it is not: Platanus x acerifolia is a seventeenth-century hybrid of the Oriental and American planes, and its bark flakes off in fine plates to leave the grey, cream and brown patchwork the species is known for. Come in January or February. With the leaves off, the whole tangle of branches is visible, and that is the only time of year you can see what the shape is actually doing.

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The Yew of the Bath of Venus

European Yew (Taxus baccata) · the register says 150 years, its own note implies 250 or more · Giardino Inglese, Bagno di Venere

This yew was already a grown tree when it was carried into the garden, which makes it older than the garden. The Campania register is explicit: the specimen was mature when it was set in place at the creation of the English Garden in the 1790s, and it calls the tree one of the patriarchs of the whole design. That is also why the age field on the same record, which says 150 years, cannot be right, and it is stated here as the disagreement it is. Nearly four metres round the trunk and twenty metres tall, it stands at the Bath of Venus, the grotto at the top of the garden where a Carrara marble Venus by Tommaso Solari, carved in 1762 and installed here around 1840, crouches on a rock above a pool. The Reggia's own description of the place records that the water surrounding the statue rises from the base of a monumental yew. That is this tree. Yew is the slowest-growing timber tree in Europe and among the longest-lived, which is exactly why an eighteenth-century designer would move a mature one rather than plant a sapling and wait. The boulders, the ferns and the ruined cryptoporticus behind it were all built to look accidental. The yew is the only part that is not.

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The Douglas Fir of the English Garden

Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) · the register says about 200 years, which is the outer edge of possible · Giardino Inglese, il Palco

At forty metres, only one other tree in Caserta's register stands as tall, and this one's stated age does not quite work. The Campania register gives it about two hundred years, which would mean a planting around 1826. David Douglas did not send the first seed of the species back from the Pacific Northwest until 1827, and it spread through European gardens over the decades that followed, so two hundred is the outer edge of what is possible and is more likely a round number than a measurement. The tree itself is not in doubt. Five metres eighty around the trunk, forty metres of it, with the thick corky grey bark split into broad plates, which is armour: in its native range the species survives ground fire that kills its neighbours because that bark insulates the trunk. Douglas fir is the timber tree of the American west, the one that built ships, bridges and most of Oregon, and nineteenth-century Europe planted it hard for exactly that reason. Here it does no work at all. It stands in the middle of a landscape garden designed to look wild and engineered to the last stone, alongside a cedar, a cork oak and a plane from three other continents, all of them collected for a queen who wanted a botanical garden and got one.

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The Sweet Osmanthus of the Winding Path

Sweet Osmanthus (Osmanthus fragrans) · about 150 years · Giardino Inglese

The national register credits this tree with six and a half metres of trunk. The regional one adds the detail that makes sense of it: that figure is every stem added together, not one trunk, because Osmanthus fragrans grows as a bundle rather than a column. It is ten metres tall, which is large for the species, and the register calls it a rarity in this climate. The reason to walk to it is the smell. For a few weeks in autumn a sweet osmanthus in flower puts out one of the strongest scents any hardy tree makes, apricot and ripe peach, carried well past the tree itself, and it comes from flowers so small you have to hunt for them: clusters of cream stars a few millimetres across, tucked into the leaf axils. In China, where the species comes from, those flowers are picked for tea, for wine and for sweets, and the city of Guilin takes its name from them. Graefer and the botanists who followed him were buying novelty from the far side of the world for a queen who wanted her garden to beat the other royal gardens of Europe. This is one of the few things they planted that a visitor notices without being told what it is.

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The Camphor Tree of the Palco

Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · about 200 years · Giardino Inglese, il Palco

Thirty-eight metres is a strange height for a camphor tree. In Japan and southern China, where the species is native and where it is planted at shrines, it usually spreads wide and low. A camphor drawn up to thirty-eight metres has been competing for light its whole life, and this one stands in the most crowded corner of the English Garden, the low meadow the gardeners called the Palco, on the south-eastern side towards Puccianiello. The register puts it at about two hundred years, which places it with the first generation of the garden. Camphor is a laurel, and the whole tree smells. Crush a leaf and you get the entire medicine cabinet, because the wood and foliage are the historic source of camphor itself, distilled for centuries for embalming, moth-proofing, liniment and, for a few decades, smokeless gunpowder. The chemistry is a defence, which is why camphor timber resists insects and why it was cut in enormous quantity in Taiwan and Japan until synthetic camphor arrived and the trade collapsed. This one was never cut. Its bark is fissured in long vertical lines, its new leaves flush bronze before turning glossy, and it is not alone: the Reggia has more camphors elsewhere in the park, including a row of eight nearer the palace.

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The Cork Oak of the Palco

Cork Oak (Quercus suber) · over 150 years · Giardino Inglese, il Palco

This is the one tree on the walk you can put a hand on and be surprised. Cork oak grows an outer bark up to thirty centimetres thick, spongy and slightly warm to the touch, and it is the only European tree whose bark regenerates completely after being stripped, which is why Portugal and Spain harvest it on a nine-year cycle for wine corks and floor tiles. Four metres twenty around the trunk and twenty-eight metres tall, this one has never been harvested. A stripped cork oak carries a smooth ochre trunk for years afterwards, so the deep fissured layer here is the mark of a tree left alone since it was planted. The register adds something worth knowing: several smaller cork oaks stand scattered around it in no pattern at all, which is what happens when an old tree in an irrigated garden is left long enough to seed itself. The bark is also why the species survives fire across the Iberian dehesa. It insulates the trunk well enough that the tree comes back from a burn that kills everything around it, a useful thing to have evolved in a landscape people have been burning for grazing for four thousand years. In a garden of imported curiosities, this one is a Mediterranean native doing what it does at home.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Caserta?: The yew at the Bath of Venus, in the English Garden of the Reggia. The regional register says it was already a mature tree when it was set there in the 1790s, so it predates the garden. The Douglas fir and the camphor are each given about 200 years.
Do you have to pay to see them?: Yes. All seven stand inside the English Garden of the Reggia di Caserta, which is covered by the combined Royal Park and English Garden ticket, 9 euro plus a 1 euro online fee. A 3 euro park-only ticket exists but excludes the English Garden. Closed Tuesdays.
Can you walk between them?: Easily, once you are there. Six of the seven sit within about 200 metres of each other in the flat southern part of the English Garden that the royal gardeners called the Palco, and the yew is 500 metres further up. Getting to the garden is the long part: it is roughly 2.5 km from the palace gate along the main axis, or take the electric shuttle.
Which is the strangest?: The sweet osmanthus. The national register credits it with 6.5 metres of trunk; the regional one explains that this is every stem added together, because the species grows as a bundle. In autumn it produces a scent of apricot from flowers a few millimetres wide.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Caserta? The full answer, with map and directions.
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Walk all 7 trees about 0.8 km, 11 min on foot