Il Platano Grande dei Giardini Montanelli

Milan's monumental-tree register calls this one simply the platano grande, the big plane, and at 6.25 metres round it is among the widest trunks the city has measured in any park. Lightning found it at some point and split part of its crown; rather than remove the damage, the city's arborists cabled the broken limbs back to the trunk, and the cables have held since. Woodpeckers moved into the wound the strike left behind, hollowing a nesting cavity into wood already opened by the burn, and researchers from Universita Bicocca have used the tree to study what actually lives in an urban canopy this size, cataloguing the insects and small fauna that treat 28 metres of storm-scarred plane as home. Someone once tried to saw into the trunk itself; the cut has healed over but is still readable if you know where to look. No source records when it was planted, so this is Ancient Trees' own honest estimate rather than a documented age: judged against two smaller, similarly dated planes elsewhere in the same garden, it is probably a century old at the least, maybe close to two. It stands inside Giardini Montanelli, a five-minute walk from the tree the city calls its own 'biodiversity plane', which makes this corner of the park worth slowing down for twice over.