The Redwood of the Orto Botanico

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.