The Cedar of Lebanon of the Orto Botanico

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.