What is the oldest tree in Caserta?
Caserta's oldest tree is almost certainly the European yew at the Bath of Venus, in the English Garden of the Reggia. The Campania regional register calls it one of the patriarchs of the garden and records that it was already a mature tree when it was put in place at the garden's creation in the 1790s, which puts it comfortably past 250 years even though the age field on the same record says only 150. The Douglas fir and the camphor tree a few hundred metres downhill are each given about 200 years, and no tree in Caserta has been dated by counting rings.
Every age on this page comes from one place, the Campania regional register of monumental trees, and every age on it is an eta presunta, an estimate. The national MASAF register lists the same trees with the same girths and heights but carries no age field at all, so the two agree on what stands where and only one of them says how old it is. That matters more here than in most cities, because almost nothing in this garden is native and almost nothing was planted before 1786. Maria Carolina commissioned the garden that year on the advice of Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador in Naples, and John Andrew Graefer, the gardener sent to build it, spent a decade collecting exotics from Capri, Salento and Palermo. Under Giovanni Gussone and Nicola Terracciano it later became a working botanical garden. So most of these trees are between 150 and 240 years old, and where a register says 200 it means the first planting rather than a measurement. The park also loses trees in storms, most recently a monumental Monterey cypress in December 2019, so treat any single specimen as something to check before a long trip.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.