Il Noce del Caucaso di Parco Sempione

This walnut grows almost horizontally over the water, its lower limbs bending so far toward the pond in Parco Sempione that locals joke it is trying to drink from it. Pterocarya fraxinifolia is native to the Caucasus and northern Iran, a wetland species that thrives on constantly moist soil, exactly the condition it gets growing at the edge of the artificial lake beside the Ponte delle Sirenette, a footbridge moved here in 1930 when the canal it originally crossed elsewhere in Milan was filled in. Its trunk measures 4.35 metres around and 18 metres high, and Italy's monumental tree registry lists it, along with a companion specimen nearby, as the oldest Caucasian walnut in the city, though no source gives either tree an exact age or planting date. Compound leaves, similar in shape to an ash tree's, turn a warm gold in October and November alongside the marsh cypresses planted at the same waterline, briefly making the pond's edge the best autumn colour anywhere in the park. Visitors headed for the Castello Sforzesco or the Triennale rarely detour the extra hundred metres to the water's edge where it grows.