La Sofora di Varedo

Italy's national register of monumental trees rarely carries this species. The Sofora del Giappone at Varedo is a Japanese pagoda tree, an ornamental from East Asia, and it holds a register sheet of its own: 18 metres tall, with no girth recorded at all. It stands on Piazza della Pace, the church square at the edge of the same park that holds the town's four monumental hackberries, about a hundred metres from the largest of them. Lombardy's regional tourism board reaches this tree first in its account of Varedo and calls it the interesting one before it gets to the giants. That is a fair order. The hackberries win on bulk; this is the one people stop in front of and fail to name. What gives it away is the foliage, which reads like a robinia's, each leaf divided into small oval leaflets, and then the flowers, loose showy clusters of white to yellow, followed by pods that hang like beans. The pods are the family telling on itself: this is a legume, related to peas rather than to anything else on the square. Nobody has put a tape around its trunk and nobody has dated it. The height is the only number anyone has written down. If you know either of the missing figures, tell us.