Pisa is famous for a tower that leans. A few hundred metres away, the university's botanical garden, the oldest of its kind still on its original ground, holds four trees planted between 1787 and 1829: a ginkgo and a magnolia set down by the same director in the same season, a plane whose species even the sources cannot agree on, and a live oak from the American South. All four are still standing.
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The Ginkgo of Giorgio Santi
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · about 240 years · Near Piazza dei Miracoli, historic centre
This is reckoned to be the first ginkgo ever planted in Tuscany. Giorgio Santi, director of Pisa's university botanical garden, put it in the ground in 1787, in the section still called the Orto del Cedro, and the sapling is said to have arrived from London. Watching him do it was Gaetano Savi, young at the time and later Santi's successor in the job.
Two and a bit centuries on it is the largest tree in the garden, four metres around the trunk, and it still drops its fan-shaped leaves in one short yellow week every autumn. It has stood through the French occupation of Tuscany, the unification of Italy, two world wars and about eight generations of botany students, all of it a few hundred metres from the Leaning Tower.
Santi planted a magnolia the same year in the same corner, and those two are the oldest trees still alive here. They are worth seeing as a pair: one an evergreen import from the American South, the other a Chinese species with no close living relatives, both chosen by the same man in the same season and both outliving him by two hundred years.
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The Magnolia of Giorgio Santi
Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) · about 240 years · Near Piazza dei Miracoli, historic centre
Pisa's two oldest living trees went into the ground the same year, planted by the same man, in the same corner of the garden. This is the other one. Giorgio Santi, then director of the university's botanical garden, set a ginkgo and this southern magnolia into the Orto del Cedro in 1787, and both are still standing.
The magnolia is now around 14 metres tall. That is a long way from the coastal woods of the American southeast, where the species comes from, and a good result for a tree that spent its first decades as an expensive curiosity. There is no bare season to catch it in: the leaves are dark, glossy and evergreen, rust-coloured and felted underneath, and in early summer the flowers open cream-white and heavy, big enough to fill two hands.
Nobody has taped the trunk, or nobody has published the number, so we cannot tell you how thick it is. If you have measured it, tell us.
What it has watched from that spot is a working university: Napoleon's reorganisation of Tuscany, the making of a unified Italy, students collecting specimens in the 1840s and students doing the same thing this morning. Santi died in 1822. His magnolia has outlived him by two centuries and is still flowering every June.
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3
The Plane of the Scuola Botanica
Plane (Platanus sp., disputed: see note) · about 220 years · Near Piazza dei Miracoli, historic centre
Two sources have looked at this tree and come back with two different species. One calls it an oriental plane, Platanus orientalis. The other calls it Platanus occidentalis, the American sycamore. They agree on everything else: planted in 1808, in the arboretum of the Scuola Botanica, still there.
The disagreement is less embarrassing than it sounds, because the two species named are the parents of a third. The London plane is their natural hybrid, and most of the old planes of European streets and gardens turn out to be that hybrid rather than either parent. A two-hundred-year-old Italian platano filed under two names at once is an ordinary kind of confusion, and it is why this page will not commit to more than Platanus. Somebody standing in front of it with a fruit cluster in hand could settle it in a morning.
What is certain is that the tree survived an edit. When Theodore Caruel reorganised the Scuola Botanica in the late 1800s, laying out new beds in new orders, a handful of specimens were too well established to move and simply stayed where they were. This is one of them, along with the Virginia oak planted twenty-one years after it.
One source puts its height at 23 metres. The leaves are the tell: cut almost to the midrib for the oriental parent, broad and shallow for the American. Tell us what you find.
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4
The Virginia Oak of 1829
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · about 195 years · Near Piazza dei Miracoli, historic centre
A live oak from the American South has been growing in Pisa since 1829. Quercus virginiana is the tree of Georgia and the Carolinas, the one that carries Spanish moss in photographs; this one carries nothing, stands in a Tuscan university garden, and has been doing so for nearly two centuries.
Italy has never quite settled on what to call it. One account lists it as the quercia della Virginia, the Virginia oak. Another, written by a visitor reading the plaques on site, records it as the leccio della Virginia, borrowing the word for holm oak instead. That is a fair slip. Like a holm oak, a live oak holds small leathery leaves through the winter and looks almost nothing like the oaks a European expects to see.
It is one of the specimens that stayed put when the Scuola Botanica was rearranged in the late 1800s, along with the plane planted in 1808. Nobody appears to have measured the trunk, so what exists is a planting year and no girth. If you get a tape around it, we would like the number.
The beds around it hold other dated arrivals from the same century of collecting, a sequoia from 1868 and an araucaria from 1872 that has reached 25 metres. Pisa was importing the New World a tree at a time, and this oak is one of the earlier receipts.
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