Lucca keeps most of its best trees inside a ring eight hundred metres across, one of the shortest walks on this site. Three stand in a botanical garden founded in 1820: a cedar from Lebanon, a Californian redwood, and a ginkgo that lightning knocked down and regrew as three trunks. Elsewhere inside the ring are a cypress on a gun platform, a cedar with a name, and seven oaks on a tower roof. Four more trees have since joined: three deeper in the garden, and a fourth, the city's thickest plane, on the ramparts near Porta San Donato.
0 / 14 visités à Lucca
Photo : Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1
The Cedar of Lebanon of the Orto Botanico
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · 204 years, planted in 1822 · Centro Storico
This tree is two years younger than the garden around it. Maria Luisa di Borbone, Duchess of Lucca, founded the Orto Botanico in 1820 as a teaching collection for the city's medical school, and in 1822 the first director, Paolo Volpi, put a young cedar in the ground with Count Bernardino Orsetti. The seedling came from the botanical garden at Pisa. Two centuries later it is six and a half metres round the trunk, about twenty metres tall, and it holds its foliage in the flat horizontal plates that only an old Lebanon cedar makes, so the whole crown reads as a series of dark tiers rather than a dome. The garden calls it the patriarch and uses it as its symbol. The species itself comes from the mountains of Lebanon, Syria and southern Turkey, where the Phoenicians cut it for ships and the same forests supplied Solomon's temple, and where very little of it is left standing. Almost every specimen in Europe descends from a handful of eighteenth and nineteenth century plantings like this one. Stand at the trunk and the visitor beside you is roughly one tenth of its girth.
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Photo : Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2
The Redwood of the Orto Botanico
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · about 176 years, planted around 1850 · Centro Storico
The tallest living thing inside Lucca's walls is Californian. At thirty-five metres this redwood clears every tower in the old town except the two you can climb, and it was planted around 1850, which is the detail worth pausing on. Western botanists had only described the coast redwood in 1847, and the first seed reached Europe a few years before that. A garden in a walled Tuscan city was therefore growing one within a decade of the species existing on paper. It is now five and three quarter metres round. Coast redwood is the tallest tree species on earth, and the record specimens in northern California pass a hundred and fifteen metres, so this one is a child by the standards of its own kind and will very likely still be growing in three hundred years. Put a hand on the trunk: the bark is soft, dry and fibrous, thirty centimetres deep on old trees, and it is what lets a redwood survive fires that kill everything around it. A second registered redwood stands forty metres away, a little smaller, and the garden counts a third among its nineteenth century plantings.
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3
The Three-Trunked Ginkgo
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · about 164 years, planted in 1862 · Centro Storico
Lightning took this tree down after the war and it came back as three. The ginkgo planted here in 1862 was struck in the post-war years and thrown into regrowth, and the garden let three of the resulting shoots run. They are now three full trunks of one tree, twenty-six metres tall, which is why the national register, which lists a trunk girth for almost everything it protects, leaves the figure blank for this one. There is no single trunk to measure. Ginkgo biloba is the last species of an entire order of plants, with no living relative closer than the conifers, and fossils of nearly identical leaves come out of rock two hundred million years old. It survives what other trees do not: it was among the first things to grow back near the epicentre at Hiroshima, and the trick on display here, rebuilding itself from a wrecked base, is the same trait. Come in the middle of November. The garden treats the turn as one of its events of the year, when the leaves go from green to a hard uniform yellow and then drop, often most of them within a day or two, leaving a gold floor and a bare tree above it.
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4
The Monterey Cypress on the San Regolo Bastion
Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) · roughly 150 years, undated · Mura Urbane
In the wild this species grows in two small groves on a single stretch of Californian coast near Monterey and nowhere else on earth. This one is twenty-eight metres tall and stands on the roof of a gun platform built between 1600 and 1605 by Piero Vignarelli, on walls that were designed to stop artillery and never had to. That is the joke of Lucca's fortifications: four and a half kilometres of state of the art sixteenth century defences that were never attacked, and which the city therefore turned into a park. Maria Luisa di Borbone laid out the promenade along the top in the 1820s, and from 1860 Cesare Bicchi, who ran the botanical garden immediately below the bastion, used the walls as an extension of his collection and planted exotic conifers where cannon had stood. This cypress is his, and at three and a half metres round it is one of only three trees on the whole circuit that the national register protects. It is evergreen, so it looks the same in February as in August, and it is free to visit at any hour, which the garden below it is not.
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Photo : Graeme Maclean (CC BY 2.0)
5
The Holm Oaks on the Torre Guinigi
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · not dated, the living oaks are replantings · Centro Storico
Seven oaks grow forty-four metres above the street, in a brick box of earth on the roof of a medieval tower, and they are the emblem of the city. The Guinigi were Lucca's ruling family in the early fifteenth century, when Paolo Guinigi held the city as its lord, and a tower crowned with trees already appears in Giovanni Sercambi's illustrated chronicle from that period. So the idea is six hundred years old. The trees are not. Holm oaks in a container do not live like holm oaks in the ground, and the seven up there have been replaced more than once without anyone recording when, which is why this entry gives no age. What the box does is keep them small: an ordinary Quercus ilex reaches twenty metres and these are shrubs by comparison, dense, dark, evergreen, with the small hard leaves that let the species hold a Mediterranean summer. Getting there costs 8 euro and 230 steps up the inside of the tower. You come out under the canopy, with the roofs of Lucca below and the Apuan Alps behind, which is a better arrival than most trees on this site can offer.
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6
The Cedar of the Righteous at Villa Bottini
Atlas Cedar (Cedrus atlantica) · undated, and no older than the 1840s · Centro Storico
On 25 April 2021 this cedar was given a name. Lucca's Garden of the Righteous, in the grounds of Villa Bottini, dedicates trees to people who sheltered others during the war, and this one carries don Renzo Tambellini, an Oblate priest of the Holy Face who from the middle of 1943 turned his community's house into the hub of a network that hid Jews and partisans, and who was later given the gold medal for civil merit. Two more trees went to two more priests the same morning, an incense cedar for don Guido Staderini and a plane for don Sirio Niccolai. The tree itself is the largest registered trunk in the whole municipality: seven metres round and thirty metres tall, in the garden of a villa finished in 1581 for Bernardino Buonvisi, a silk merchant who built it to receive delegations rather than to live in. Nothing dates the cedar, though the species only reached European gardens from the Atlas mountains of Morocco and Algeria around 1840, which puts a hard ceiling on it. The garden is municipal and free, and it is 300 metres from the botanical garden gate.
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7
The Corsican Pine of the Orto Botanico
Corsican Pine (Pinus nigra subsp. laricio) · about 200 years · Centro Storico, Orto Botanico
The garden has two oldest trees and only one of them is famous. Lucca's Orto Botanico put its Cedar of Lebanon in the ground in 1822 and this Corsican pine in the same season, two years after Maria Luisa di Borbone founded the place as a teaching collection, which makes them joint founders. The cedar became the garden's symbol and its patriarch. The pine just grew: thirty and a half metres now, two metres eighty-two round the trunk.
Pinus nigra subsp. laricio is the Corsican and Calabrian form of the black pine, and it is the tall, straight one. It sends up a single clean stem with the branches in loose whorls, and it was cut for ships' masts for exactly that reason, under Genoese rule and then French. In a walled garden in Tuscany it has had no wind to fight and no neighbours to race, and it has gone straight up anyway, because that is what the tree does.
Two sources carry the 1822 date, the national monumental tree register and the local paper's 2024 survey of the thirty-six monumental trees in the comune, which is more than most of the trees on this page can claim. It is inside the garden, which charges admission, and it is a two-minute walk from the cedar, the redwood and the three-trunked ginkgo. Most visitors walk past it to photograph the cedar.
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8
The Magnolia of Via dell'Orto Botanico
Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) · not documented · Centro Storico, Orto Botanico
Three metres twenty-three round the trunk and twenty-four metres tall, which is a great deal of magnolia. Magnolia grandiflora usually settles for half that in a European garden and does much of its growing sideways. This one stands on the street outside the botanical garden's wall, so unlike almost everything else on this walk it costs nothing and is never shut.
It appears on the national monumental tree register and nowhere else. No planting date, no plaque, no local article: one line in a register, and the tree. The garden a few metres away dates its own founding trees precisely, to 1820 and 1822, which makes the silence about a magnolia this size just outside its wall a small mystery. Inventing a year for it would not solve that.
The species comes from the American southeast, Florida up through the Carolinas, and reached European gardens in the eighteenth century, where it became the choice for anyone who wanted evergreen leaves the size of a hand. They are dark, stiff and polished on top and rust-brown and felted underneath, so the whole crown changes colour when wind gets into it.
Then in May and June it flowers, cream-white and up to thirty centimetres across, a few at a time over several weeks rather than all at once, and on a still evening the street smells of lemon.
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9
The Plane of Via del Fosso
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · not documented · Centro Storico, Via del Fosso canal street
Via del Fosso has a canal running down the middle of it, open to the sky, and this plane grows on the bank. That is most of the explanation for a trunk three metres sixty round and a crown thirty metres up. A London plane with permanent water at its roots and a straight open corridor of light above the channel has nothing to compete for.
The fosso is a working watercourse, not an ornament. It was cut to bring water into Lucca for mills and workshops, it runs down the eastern side of the walled city on the line of an older moat, which is what the name means, and it still runs. The street it makes is one of the quietest inside the walls and it is the natural route between the botanical garden at one end and Villa Bottini at the other, so this tree is on the walk whether or not you went looking for it.
The national monumental tree register lists it and gives the measurements. It does not give an age, and nothing else published names this individual tree. Planes are hard to read by eye in any case: put one somewhere it likes, as this one plainly is, and it will build a trunk several times faster than an oak on the same street would.
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10
The Nepal Camphor of Via Barsanti e Matteucci
Nepal Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum glanduliferum) · not documented · San Marco, outside the city walls
A Himalayan tree on a street named after an engine. Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci patented their internal combustion engine in 1854, working between Lucca and Florence, and the city gave them this road. The largest thing standing on it is a Cinnamomum glanduliferum from the forests of Nepal, northern India and southern China: three metres eighty-four round the trunk, twenty-four metres tall.
It is the bigger of the two in the city. The other grows inside the Orto Botanico, planted in 1888 and recorded as such. This one, out in San Marco north of the walls, has a girth a third larger and nothing behind it but a line in the national monumental tree register. No planting date, no owner, no article. That is the usual fate of a big tree on an ordinary street.
The leaves carry camphor oils, which is where both names come from; the species is a close relative of the true camphor tree and the wood was used the same way. It is evergreen, so February looks much like July, and the leaves have a pale, almost blue-grey underside that flickers when the wind turns them over.
It is a nine hundred metre walk from the botanical garden cluster, and it is outside the walls, which is the whole reason it is not better known.
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11
The Plane of Porta San Donato
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Mura Urbane (city walls), Centro Storico
Lucca's Renaissance walls are planted almost entirely as a single ring of trees, but the register singles out only three individuals along the whole circuit, and this plane, growing on the ramparts near Porta San Donato, is the thickest of the three: 4.88 metres round and 30 metres tall, the largest plane tree in the city by that measurement.
Porta San Donato itself dates to 1629, one of the six gates built when Lucca reinforced its walls against a siege that never came; the fortifications outlasted every threat they were built for and became, instead, the tree-lined promenade that rings the old town today. Nobody has dated the tree specifically, only the gate beside it.
The wall-top path, the Passeggiata delle Mura, is public, paved and open around the clock, wide enough for the joggers and cyclists who use it as Lucca's ring road for people rather than cars. This plane stands about a kilometre and a half west of the Orto Botanico cluster, an anchor for the far side of a wall walk rather than an extension of it. If you know when it was planted, tell us.
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12
The Bald Cypress Twins of the Orto Botanico
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · Centro Storico
Two bald cypresses stand fifteen metres apart at the pond in Lucca's botanical garden, buttressed at the base and throwing up the woody knees that let the species breathe in waterlogged ground, a trick it brought from the swamps of the American south. Both are registered as individually monumental, 3.15 and 2.80 metres round.
They are the only conifer in the garden that behaves like a deciduous tree, turning rust orange and dropping its needles each autumn, which in a collection built mostly around evergreens makes the pond the one spot in the Orto Botanico with a real November moment. Nobody has recorded when either tree was planted.
The garden charges standard admission and keeps published hours, unlike most of what stands on this page. Once inside, the cypresses sit a short walk from the cedar of Lebanon, redwood and three-trunked ginkgo already on this list, all reachable on one visit.
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13
The Balearic Box of the Orto Botanico
Balearic Box (Buxus balearica) · about 145 years, planted around 1880 · Centro Storico
Box is usually a hedge plant, clipped into shapes barely taller than a person. This one is seven metres tall, a Balearic box growing to the size of an actual tree, which the species rarely does anywhere it is not native. Its natural range is the Balearic Islands and a sliver of the southwest Mediterranean coast; everywhere else it stays a shrub, including, almost everywhere, in this garden's own country.
The Orto Botanico's own account, not independently re-checked this pass, puts the planting at around 1880, which would make it roughly a century and a half old, modest in girth (88 cm) but old for how slowly box grows. Italy's monumental tree register designates it in its own right, a second signal beyond the measurements that this is not just an old hedge left to run wild.
It stands inside the garden's paid grounds, a short walk from the bald cypresses at the pond. If you know its planting date for certain, tell us.
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14
The Silver Lime and Fastigiate Yew of the Orto Botanico
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) and Fastigiate Yew (Taxus baccata var. fastigiata) · the lime about 126 years, planted around 1900 · Centro Storico
The youngest tree the register protects in Lucca's botanical garden stands sixty metres from one of its slowest growing: a silver lime planted around 1900, its leaves silvery on the underside and turning up in wind, next to a fastigiate yew whose narrow, upright habit is not what makes it interesting. What makes it interesting is the girth. Yew adds wood at a crawl, and a columnar yew this thick, 2.60 metres round, has been doing it for a very long time even though nobody has put a number on how long.
The lime is easier to date, if only just: the garden's own account, not independently re-checked this pass, gives around 1900, putting it at roughly 126 years old and the youngest specimen the monumental register lists here. Its own girth, 3.60 metres, is already considerable for a tree that young, a sign of how much room and light the garden gives its plantings.
Neither tree carries much recorded history beyond its own measurements. They stand a short walk apart inside the Orto Botanico's paid grounds, on the same visit as the garden's older, better documented trees.
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