Thorvaldsen's Robinia

Bertel Thorvaldsen spent more than 40 years in Rome becoming Europe's most celebrated Neoclassical sculptor before returning home to Copenhagen in 1838 to a hero's welcome, and this multi-stemmed black locust growing beside the museum built to house his life's work is said to have come home with him, grown from seed he carried back from Italy. Denmark's dendrological society surveyed the tree in 1995 and recorded a trunk over three metres around, splitting into several stems rather than one, and estimated its age at up to 155 years at that time, consistent with a planting soon after Thorvaldsen's actual return. That would put the tree, and not just the museum, among the direct physical legacies of a sculptor whose bronze and marble work now sits in collections from the Vatican to Warsaw. Black locust is not a species anyone would plant deliberately for its connection to fine art. It is a hardy, fast-growing tree valued more for binding loose soil and producing useful timber than for looking distinguished, which makes its adoption into Thorvaldsen's own story feel almost like an accident that stuck, a workmanlike species growing beside one of Europe's grandest personal museums, surveyed precisely enough by Danish tree recorders in 2008 to give this project one of its few confirmed coordinates.