The Magnolia of Via dell'Orto Botanico

Three metres twenty-three round the trunk and twenty-four metres tall, which is a great deal of magnolia. Magnolia grandiflora usually settles for half that in a European garden and does much of its growing sideways. This one stands on the street outside the botanical garden's wall, so unlike almost everything else on this walk it costs nothing and is never shut. It appears on the national monumental tree register and nowhere else. No planting date, no plaque, no local article: one line in a register, and the tree. The garden a few metres away dates its own founding trees precisely, to 1820 and 1822, which makes the silence about a magnolia this size just outside its wall a small mystery. Inventing a year for it would not solve that. The species comes from the American southeast, Florida up through the Carolinas, and reached European gardens in the eighteenth century, where it became the choice for anyone who wanted evergreen leaves the size of a hand. They are dark, stiff and polished on top and rust-brown and felted underneath, so the whole crown changes colour when wind gets into it. Then in May and June it flowers, cream-white and up to thirty centimetres across, a few at a time over several weeks rather than all at once, and on a still evening the street smells of lemon.