The Pine of Villa Vogel

Florence's Renaissance gardens get all the attention; this pine grows in a very different kind of park. The Parco di Villa Vogel sits in Isolotto-Legnaia, a residential district southwest of the historic centre with none of the tour groups that fill Boboli or the queues outside the Uffizi, in a villa the Vogel family donated to the city in the 1980s so their grounds could become a public playground, skating rink and picnic area for the neighbourhood. This stone pine stands in what surveyors describe as the oldest surviving section of that original garden, in an isolated spot still ringed by centuries-old cypresses that predate the villa's donation by generations. Its trunk measures a modest three and a third metres around, smaller than the show-garden specimens across town, but it has outlived whatever family occasion or landscaping fashion first put it there, and it now shades children's play equipment instead of a private lawn. No record of its planting survives, consistent with a garden built for a family rather than catalogued for visitors. It is a reminder that Florence's old trees are not only in ticketed gardens and postcard piazzas: some of them just ended up in the park nearest to where ordinary Florentines happen to live.