The Cedar Above Pegasus

Florence's public symbol has stood next to this cedar since 1865, and almost nobody visiting climbs high enough in the Boboli Gardens to notice either one. The Giardino del Cavaliere, a walled terrace at the garden's highest point, holds a winged horse statue that the Tuscany region has since adopted as its own official emblem, sculpted by Aristodemo Costoli the same year Florence became capital of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. Growing beside it is a deodar cedar, a Himalayan species that had only reached European gardens a few decades earlier, after British and French plant hunters brought seed back from the mountains of Kashmir and Nepal in the 1830s and 40s. Boboli's specimen has grown a trunk nearly four and three quarter metres around, evergreen and untouched by the seasonal crowds that mob the garden's lower amphitheatre for weddings and photographs. No planting record for this particular tree has surfaced, so its age can only be bounded by the species' own arrival in Europe and the terrace's known history, putting it somewhere in its second century at most. It stands quietly above one of the most visited gardens in Italy, on a terrace most day trippers skip because it means one more flight of steps after the main lawns.