Trsteno's Cedar of Lebanon

Planted in 1871, this cedar is the youngest of the eight trees Trsteno's own dendrological survey names as the arboretum's oldest documented specimens, and even at roughly 155 years old it already qualifies as a mature, textbook example of a species famous for taking its time. Cedar of Lebanon grows slowly by the standards of most garden trees, developing the wide, flat-tiered canopy visitors associate with the species only after many decades, which means this specimen has spent most of its life still visibly maturing into its now-characteristic shape. It arrived at Trsteno during the same 19th-century wave of exotic plantings that brought the arboretum's ginkgos and other now-venerable specimens, decades after the two famous 500-year-old plane trees outside the gate were already ancient by any measure. The cedar's own native range runs through the mountains of Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, forests logged for construction timber since the biblical era and now surviving only in fragments, which makes botanical gardens like Trsteno part of the species' effective range as much as its wild mountains are. Visitors touring the arboretum's grounds, a paid ticket beyond the free plane trees at the village gate, pass this cedar as part of the same 19th-century collecting era that shaped most of what grows here today.