The Cedar of the Palco

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.