The Corsican Pine of the Orto Botanico

The garden has two oldest trees and only one of them is famous. Lucca's Orto Botanico put its Cedar of Lebanon in the ground in 1822 and this Corsican pine in the same season, two years after Maria Luisa di Borbone founded the place as a teaching collection, which makes them joint founders. The cedar became the garden's symbol and its patriarch. The pine just grew: thirty and a half metres now, two metres eighty-two round the trunk. Pinus nigra subsp. laricio is the Corsican and Calabrian form of the black pine, and it is the tall, straight one. It sends up a single clean stem with the branches in loose whorls, and it was cut for ships' masts for exactly that reason, under Genoese rule and then French. In a walled garden in Tuscany it has had no wind to fight and no neighbours to race, and it has gone straight up anyway, because that is what the tree does. Two sources carry the 1822 date, the national monumental tree register and the local paper's 2024 survey of the thirty-six monumental trees in the comune, which is more than most of the trees on this page can claim. It is inside the garden, which charges admission, and it is a two-minute walk from the cedar, the redwood and the three-trunked ginkgo. Most visitors walk past it to photograph the cedar.