The Himalayan Chir Pine of the English Garden

The chir pine is tapped for resin on Himalayan foothills from Pakistan to Nepal, and one of them grows in the garden of a Bourbon palace outside Naples. Pinus roxburghii is a tree of dry slopes between roughly 500 and 2,000 metres, where whole local economies run on it: resin for turpentine and rosin, timber for building, and needles swept up in quantity for fodder, fuel and bedding. Those needles are among the longest of any pine, up to thirty centimetres, carried in drooping bundles of three, so the crown reads looser and shaggier than any European pine standing near it. This one is twenty-five metres tall with three metres fifty around the trunk. A Himalayan pine is not garden decoration, it is a collector's tree, and the English Garden spent much of the nineteenth century working as a botanical collection under Giovanni Gussone and later Nicola Terracciano, who filled it with species nobody in Campania had grown before. The queen it was built for in 1786 wanted a garden that would beat the other royal gardens of Europe, and the botanists who came after her kept buying. The register puts the pine at about a hundred and fifty years and marks the number as an estimate. Nothing in this garden has been dated by counting rings, so read it as a period rather than a date.