The Chilgoza Pine of the English Garden

Two trees in Caserta's monumental register share the title of tallest, and this pine is one of them: forty metres, tied with the Douglas fir a short walk away. Pinus gerardiana is a strange choice for a European garden. It grows wild only in the dry inner valleys of the north-west Himalaya, across Pakistan, Afghanistan and northern India, where its seeds, chilgoza pine nuts, are a real harvested crop rather than a curiosity, sold by weight in markets from Kabul to Delhi. Almost nothing else in cultivated Europe reaches this size; most specimens outside the species' native range stay ornamental and modest. This one has a girth of three metres ten, respectable rather than remarkable next to the garden's giant cedars and redwoods, and the height is the whole story: whoever planted it, sometime in the century and a half the register credits it with, gave it the room and the time to do something the species rarely gets to do this far from the mountains it comes from. The needles grow in bundles of three, unusually long, and the cones take two full years to ripen the seeds inside them. Nobody has recorded checking whether it still fruits this far from home, but if it does, autumn is when to look.