The Monterey Cypress of the Giardino Simone Weil

In the wild this species grows on two small headlands in California and nowhere else on earth. There is one of it on a Florentine hillside. Cupressus macrocarpa survives naturally at Cypress Point and Point Lobos near Monterey, a couple of miles of wind-flattened trees on the Pacific coast. Move it away from that coast and it behaves like a different plant: it grows fast, spreads wide and reaches sizes it never manages at home, which is how it ended up in gardens from New Zealand to Tuscany. This one has a trunk of 388 centimetres and stands 18.5 metres, dark and broad-crowned, in a free public garden a hundred metres or so from the Bobolino trees. What is not known about it is the interesting part. The national register of monumental trees carries the species, the girth and the height, and nothing else. No age, no planting date, no record of who put it there, and no independent source was found to corroborate any of it. A Monterey cypress of this size in Italy is most likely a nineteenth-century garden planting, from the decades when the species had just reached Europe and every serious garden wanted one. That is inference rather than evidence, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are being handed.