The Montezuma Cypress of the Garden of the Princes

Nicknamed the Tree of Thule after Mexico's own famous, vastly older specimen of the same species, this cypress was among the first of its kind planted anywhere in Naples, identified by Michele Tenore, the director of the city's Royal Botanical Garden, not long after it went into the ground in the 1800s. Taxodium huegelii is a Mexican relative of the bald cypress, native to riverbanks and wet ground across the country's central highlands, and remains scarce enough in Italian cultivation that this specimen still counts as a genuine botanical rarity two centuries after its planting. It has reached 18 metres with a trunk three metres around, modest next to the towering original Arbol del Tule near Oaxaca, whose trunk is wide enough that a dozen adults joining hands still cannot circle it, but a legitimate specimen of the same lineage all the same. It grows in the Garden of the Princes among camphor, yew and cypress from three different continents, one more entry in a collection Capodimonte's own Bourbon-era gardeners built specifically to be internationally strange.