The Micheli Yew

Florence's oldest verified tree grows behind a ticket gate, in a garden older than the city's most famous museums by two centuries. Pier Antonio Micheli planted this yew in 1720, while running the Orto Botanico for Cosimo III de' Medici, and it has now outlived the Grand Duchy that employed him by more than 150 years. At around 306 years old it is Florence's most precisely dated living thing: unlike the ring-count guesswork behind most ancient trees, its planting is on record because Micheli, one of Europe's first professional botanists, kept the garden's books himself. The trunk has thickened to nearly four metres around, and its dark, dense crown still throws the kind of deep shade yews are prized and feared for; every part of the tree except the red flesh around the seed is poisonous, a fact eighteenth century physicians studying it would have known well. The Giardino dei Semplici itself opened in 1545 to grow medicinal plants for the Medici, making it one of the oldest university botanical gardens anywhere in the world, and this yew has stood in it for nearly two thirds of that entire history. It survived the catastrophic 1966 Arno flood that drowned much of central Florence a few streets away, and it is still growing, still dropping the small red arils that birds strip clean every autumn.