The Coast Redwood of Villa Serra

A Californian redwood 38 and a half metres tall grows in a valley north of Genoa, and it is not even the tallest tree in its own park. Villa Serra stands in Comago, in the comune of Sant'Olcese, up the Polcevera valley and outside the city boundary, roughly nine kilometres from the centre and reached by a bus or a train and a connecting bus. What the journey buys is the tightest group of monumental trees anywhere around Genoa: this sequoia and three others stand within about sixty metres of one another in nine hectares of English-style park. Coast redwood belongs to the fog belt of northern California, where the species grows taller than anything in Europe, and it arrived in Italian gardens in the middle of the nineteenth century as the fashionable import of the moment, which is also when this garden was laid out. That timing is where the age estimate comes from: roughly 120 to 170 years, reasoned from the founding of the park and from the trunk, with no planting record for this individual and no age field in the national register to consult. Its bark is the thing to put a hand on, soft, fibrous and deep enough to shrug off fire in its home range. The park was restored and reopened in 1992. It charges admission and closes on Monday mornings.