The Aleppo Pine of Via Giramondino

An Aleppo pine keeps its cones sealed on the branch for years and opens them with heat, so the fire that kills the tree sows the next generation. That is a strategy built for a hot, dry, fire-prone coast, and it is why Pinus halepensis covers so much of the western Mediterranean while barely appearing in the Syrian city it was named after. In Florence it is a planted tree rather than a wild one. This one stands on Viale Galileo, part of the ring of hillside boulevards Giuseppe Poggi cut in the 1860s, when Florence was briefly the capital of Italy and rebuilt itself for the job. Its trunk measures 323 centimetres and it reaches 22.5 metres, the slightest of the protected trees on this stretch, though it is also the one you walk past whether you meant to or not: it sits roughly midway between the Bobolino and Piazzale Michelangelo. The evidence behind it is thin and worth saying so. Only the national register of monumental trees records it, with the comune reprinting that entry, so there is one source and no age. To tell it from the stone pines on the same walk, look at the bark high up, where an Aleppo pine goes pale grey with orange showing in the fissures, and at the needles, which are finer and a lighter green.