The Casuarina of Piazza Vanvitelli

Casuarina equisetifolia looks like a conifer and is not one. The drooping, needle-like growths that give it a pine's silhouette are jointed green stems; the actual leaves are reduced to tiny scales at each joint, an adaptation from its native coastlines of Australia and the Pacific islands, where the species holds sand dunes together in wind that would strip a broadleaf tree bare. In the centre of Piazza Vanvitelli, Caserta's town square, it just looks like an unusually feathery pine. Campania's monumental register measures its trunk at 270 centimetres, close to the minimum three metre threshold the region sets for the species and, together with its 15 metre height and its age, enough to earn it protected status. Like its two square-mates, the araucaria and the yew nearby, its planting is tied to the square's own history: laid out in phases from the late nineteenth century, on ground that had been Caserta's market square before that. A casuarina this size, this far from a coastline, is a small oddity in its own right. It costs nothing to see, stands in the open square rather than behind any gate, and shares its fifty metres of ground with two other protected trees.