The Flag-Crowned Pine

The garden keeps this pine under constant watch, and says so in print, because its crown has grown into a flag. Almost all the weight sits on one side of a long bare trunk thirty-three metres up, which is what happens when a tree spends a century reaching for the only gap in a crowded collection, and it is also the shape most likely to fail in a storm. Publishing that about a tree you are proud of is unusually frank. The pine has been in the collection since the late 1800s and took up its present position in 1922. It is the Turkish pine, though Italian sources call it pino bruzio after Calabria, and botanists have argued for a century over whether it is a species in its own right or a subspecies of the Aleppo pine; the national register still files it under Pinus halepensis. It comes from the eastern Mediterranean, from Turkey and Cyprus and the Levant, where it is the pine that colonises burnt ground first and where resin was tapped from it for centuries. Its needles are longer and darker than the Aleppo pine's, and its cones sit almost stalkless against the branch, pointing forwards. Stand back towards the garden wall to take in the whole of it.