What is the oldest tree in Lucca?

The Cedar of Lebanon in the Orto Botanico, planted in 1822 by the garden's first director and now 204 years old. The oaks on the Torre Guinigi are older as an idea and younger as trees.

Can you walk between them?

Yes, and it is a short walk. All six stand inside the city walls within about 800 metres of each other, from the botanical garden in the southeast corner to the Guinigi tower in the middle of the old town.

Do they cost anything to see?

Three do. The botanical garden charges admission, the Guinigi tower costs 8 euro and 230 steps, and the cypress on the San Regolo bastion and the cedar at Villa Bottini are free.

Are there really trees on top of the Guinigi tower?

Seven of them, holm oaks, growing in a walled box of earth 44 metres above the street. They are the emblem of the city and they are the reason people climb the tower.

Italy

Ancient Trees in Lucca

Lucca keeps its best trees inside a ring eight hundred metres across, which makes this one of the shortest walks on this site. Three of the six stand in a botanical garden founded in 1820 and planted with things nobody in Tuscany had seen: a cedar from Lebanon by way of Pisa, a Californian redwood raised almost as soon as the species reached Europe, and a ginkgo that lightning knocked down and that grew back as three. The other three are a cypress on a gun platform, a cedar with a name, and seven oaks on a tower roof.

Photo: Palickap, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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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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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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, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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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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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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Lucca?: The Cedar of Lebanon in the Orto Botanico, planted in 1822 by the garden's first director and now 204 years old. The oaks on the Torre Guinigi are older as an idea and younger as trees.
Can you walk between them?: Yes, and it is a short walk. All six stand inside the city walls within about 800 metres of each other, from the botanical garden in the southeast corner to the Guinigi tower in the middle of the old town.
Do they cost anything to see?: Three do. The botanical garden charges admission, the Guinigi tower costs 8 euro and 230 steps, and the cypress on the San Regolo bastion and the cedar at Villa Bottini are free.
Are there really trees on top of the Guinigi tower?: Seven of them, holm oaks, growing in a walled box of earth 44 metres above the street. They are the emblem of the city and they are the reason people climb the tower.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Lucca? The full answer, with map and directions.
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Walk all 6 trees about 1.0 km, 13 min on foot