The Southern Magnolia of Piazza Carlo di Borbone

Four metres forty around the trunk is a great deal of magnolia, and this one asks nobody for a ticket. It grows on Piazza Carlo di Borbone, the elliptical square in front of the Reggia, rather than behind the wall of the English Garden up the hill, twenty-five metres tall and open to anyone at any hour. Magnolia grandiflora comes from the warm southeastern United States and has been planted as a specimen tree across Europe since the middle of the eighteenth century, for two reasons. The leaves stay on all year, dark and leathery on top with a rust-coloured felt underneath that is worth turning one over to see. And the flowers are enormous, cream white, up to thirty centimetres across and scented of lemon, opening a few at a time through the summer rather than all at once, so the tree is never covered in them and never quite out of them either. The building behind it has had a stranger life than the tree. By 1944 the palace was Allied headquarters in the Mediterranean, and on 29 April 1945 the surrender of German forces in Italy was signed inside it. The magnolia was well grown by then: the Campania register credits it with about a hundred and fifty years, an estimate rather than a recorded planting date, which would have made it roughly eighty years old on the morning of the signing.