The Himalayan Cedar of the Semplici

The Himalayan cedar only reached Europe in 1822, and this one was on the garden's books by 1880, which makes it an early adopter of a tree that half the continent would go on to plant in every park it built. It has had at least 146 years to make the case: four and a fifth metres round, twenty-eight metres up, with the drooping branch tips that separate a deodar from the stiffer cedars of Lebanon and the Atlas. The leading shoot nods over instead of standing straight and the outer branches hang in soft grey-green curtains, which is the quickest way to tell the three cedars apart from thirty metres off, and worth knowing here because a cedar of Lebanon grows across the river at the Bobolino. In its own range, from Afghanistan through Kashmir to western Nepal, this species reaches sixty metres on mountainsides at two thousand metres, and its wood resists rot well enough that Himalayan temples were built from it. Deodar comes from devadaru, the Sanskrit for timber of the gods. The garden acquired it during the decades when European collections competed for Himalayan and Mexican material, the same appetite that brought the Montezuma cypress here four years later. It is evergreen, so it looks much the same whenever you come, which is a reason to go rather than a reason to wait.