What is the oldest tree in Florence?

Most claims about a city's oldest tree rest on estimated girth rather than any documented planting date, which is what makes the Giardino dei Semplici's yew unusual: its 1720 planting is on record because Pier Antonio Micheli, the botanist who added it, ran the garden's own books at the time. That gives Florence something rarer than an old tree: a tree whose age nobody has to guess at. It grows in the Giardino dei Semplici, a walled botanical garden on Via Pier Antonio Micheli near Piazza San Marco, founded in 1545 by Cosimo I de' Medici to grow medicinal plants and now among the oldest university botanical gardens still operating anywhere. A ticket is required, unlike most of the trees on this list. Nearby grows a cork oak planted less than a century later, in 1805, and a Mexican cypress added in 1884 that has since grown the widest trunk of any tree in the city. All three have spent their entire lives within a few hundred metres of one another, tended by a sequence of directors rather than left to grow wild, which is exactly why their ages are known instead of estimated.