The Smaller Bunya Pine of Villa Bellini

Forty centimetres of trunk is the whole difference between this bunya pine and the one standing twenty to thirty metres away. Italy's national register lists them as two separate monuments, at 3.00 and 3.40 metres around, and a second registry re-measured them at 3.05 and 3.33. On height the difference more or less vanishes and may even run the other way: this one comes out at roughly 22.5 metres against its neighbour's 22, a gap nobody would pick out from the path. The national register puts this tree at 40 metres, which the independent measurement does not support and which reads as an error on the sheet, the same kind that inflates its neighbour to 45. Araucaria bidwillii is native to a small stretch of southeast Queensland, and in a Sicilian garden it does what it does at home: a straight bare column carrying a dark tiered crown, with leaves stiff and sharp enough to be worth not grabbing. Neither tree has a documented age. No planting record survives and neither register carries a figure, so what a visitor gets is size rather than years. The two stand close enough that they are one stop on a walk through Villa Bellini, which is the honest way to see them: side by side, forty centimetres apart in the paperwork and near enough identical in person.