The Cretan Palm That Came Back From a War

This palm arrived in Naples as a war souvenir. Campania's regional register records it as a ricordo di guerra, brought back during Italy's military campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean in the early 1900s, which is how a tree endemic to Crete and a handful of Aegean islands came to stand a few steps inside the main gate of a Bourbon hunting park. Phoenix theophrasti is one of only two palms native to Europe, the other being the dwarf fan palm of the western Mediterranean. It is named for Theophrastus, the Greek who wrote the first surviving books on plants around 300 BC, and in the wild it clings on in a few dozen ravines and beaches on Crete and the Turkish coast. This one does something its species is not supposed to do. The trunk divides low down into several stems, which the register calls atypical for the genus and which is how you pick it out from every other palm in the park. It stands sixteen metres and measures 3.8 metres round, a figure the national and regional registers give identically. The register put its age at 100 years when the record was compiled, so read it as a little over a century now.