The Camphor Tree of the 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.