The Cedar of Lebanon of Villa Durazzo Pallavicini

Two trees from opposite ends of the old trading world stand together at this lake: an East Asian camphor and this Cedar of Lebanon, and the Ministry of Culture names both in its description of the park. The cedar is the smaller of the pair at 25 metres, with a trunk 320 centimetres round, and it is the one with the longer history behind it. Cedrus libani is the tree of the Phoenician shipwrights and of the Bible's building accounts, cut out of the mountains of Lebanon for three thousand years until little more than remnant groves were left, then replanted across European estates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the grandest thing a landowner could stand on a lawn. That is roughly what happened here. Villa Durazzo Pallavicini's park in Pegli was built in the middle of the nineteenth century as a designed walk in acts and scenes, and a cedar at the water's edge is exactly the set piece such a garden reaches for. No planting record survives for this tree, so the 100 to 180 year estimate rests on the trunk and on the age of the garden around it. One caution for anyone searching: a different and larger Cedar of Lebanon grows at a Villa Pallavicini in Arenzano, twenty kilometres further west. This is not that tree.