What is the oldest tree in Milan?

One of a pair of ginkgo trees in the Orto Botanico di Brera, planted in 1775 from seed brought directly from China. Depending on the calculation method, the pair is 235 to 251 years old, the oldest documented trees in the city by a wide margin.

Are Milan's remarkable trees free to visit?

All twenty-five on this list are free. Unlike Rome or Florence, none of Milan's most remarkable trees stand inside a paid garden or monument; the closest things to a ticket are Parco Trotter's restricted opening hours, since its grounds double as a working school, and the park of Villa Marietti Radice Fossati, where the Archdevil hackberry grows: the city asks for the discretion due to an inhabited place, because people live in the villa buildings, and says the gate may be passed to visit the park.

Why does Milan have so few genuinely ancient trees compared to Rome or Florence?

Milan lacks the long-running institutional gardens, papal villas and monastery grounds that protected old trees elsewhere in Italy. Almost everything on this list was planted deliberately within the last two centuries, inside parks built from scratch or squares redesigned after the city's rapid nineteenth and twentieth century growth.

Has Milan lost any of its historic trees recently?

Yes. A widely loved 200-year-old red oak known as the Quercia di Montale fell in October 2019 during heavy rain; its trunk is preserved in place rather than removed. A plane tree planted in 1773 at Villa Litta, once one of the city's oldest, was felled in 2015 after a fungal disease; a cross-section of its trunk is displayed inside the villa.

Italy

の古樹Milan

地図上の30本

Milan's remarkable trees are rarely medieval; the city rebuilt itself too many times, and around itself even more, for old wood to survive by accident. What lasted here did so because an institution kept records (a university's ginkgo pair, brought from China in 1775), a neighbourhood organised (a paulownia a Brera committee saved from a car park in 2016), or a park changed its job entirely (a horse-racing track that became a school for sick children in 1919 and kept its oaks). Thirty trees, and almost every one owes its survival to a specific human decision.

Il Sacerdote

Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · approximately 156 years · Porta Venezia

For years, gardeners in Porta Venezia's park called this tree a metasequoia and had the genus wrong before anyone checked properly. It is in fact a bald cypress, one of the first ever planted in Milan, native to the swamps of the American South rather than to any part of Italy, and one of very few conifers anywhere that drops its needles for winter, the trait that gives the whole species its English name. Standing roughly 35 metres tall with a trunk 6.2 metres around, it grows at the edge of the artificial lake inside the Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli, Milan's oldest public park, opened in 1784 on land a Habsburg duke gave up for prisoners to landscape. Other cypresses share its stretch of water, but this is the tallest and widest of the whole stand, the reason the Milanese writer and forest scholar Tiziano Fratus nicknamed it Il Sacerdote, the priest, for the way its bare winter branches spread like a robe. Its roots, like those of every bald cypress in wet ground, throw up woody knees above the waterline to breathe, a feature visitors often mistake for stumps. At around 156 years old it predates the park's nineteenth century English-garden makeover and has outlasted the zoo that once shared these grounds, dismantled in 1992.