The Magnolia of Capodimonte

Two Italian government registers list a magnolia at the same spot in the Real Bosco di Capodimonte, and they do not agree on its size. The national MASAF register puts it at 5.4 metres round and 19 metres tall, which would make it the fourth largest registered tree in the city. Campania's own regional survey, recording what its coordinates say is the same tree, gives 3 metres round, 13.5 metres tall, and an age near 150 years. Neither figure is corrected here in favour of the other. Both are what the state itself has on file, and a visitor with a tape measure could settle it faster than another search. What both agree on is the species and the spot: a Magnolia grandiflora inside the free stretch of the Real Bosco, the former royal hunting estate that wraps the Reggia di Capodimonte. The museum's own list of the garden's monumental specimens does not mention this tree at all, which is one more reason its history is thin. Magnolia grandiflora came to European gardens from the American south in the eighteenth century, prized for leathery evergreen leaves and flowers the size of dinner plates, cream white, that open a few at a time and last only days each before browning. Come for a week in early summer if you can time it; the rest of the year it is simply a very large, very dark tree in a park built for exactly this kind of specimen.