Il Noce del Caucaso dell'Orto Botanico di Brera

The famous trees in this garden are the two ginkgos of 1775, and neither of them is the one the state decided to protect. That honour went to a Caucasian wingnut at the back of the arboretum, declared a monumental tree of Italy on 11 February 2025, the first tree in the Orto Botanico di Brera ever to carry the designation, granted in the year the garden turned 250. Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the forests between the Black Sea and northern Iran, where it grows in ground too wet for most hardwoods, and it behaves in Milan the way it behaves at home: instead of one clean column it throws its limbs sideways into a low green dome, with a root system spreading as wide as the crown. The national register measures the trunk at 4.7 metres around and the tree at 29 metres, which makes it the tallest of the three wingnuts standing in central Milan and the only one on university ground. Its age has never been established by ring count or planting record; the university says over eighty years, which is a floor rather than a figure. In summer it hangs chains of winged green seeds half a metre long from every branch, the detail that gives the genus its name, from the Greek for wing and nut.