Caserta's remarkable trees split between three places now. Sixteen stand inside the English Garden of the Reggia, 23 hectares Maria Carolina had planted in 1786 as Italy's first landscape garden, past a cedar seven and three quarter metres round, a Douglas fir of forty metres and a plane that grew sideways. A magnolia stands free right at the palace gate on Piazza Carlo di Borbone, and three more, a Chilean monkey puzzle, a casuarina and a yew, stand free in Piazza Vanvitelli, the town's own square.
0 / 20 bezocht in Caserta
1
The Cedar of the Palco
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · over 150 years · Giardino Inglese
Seven and three quarter metres around the trunk, and sixteen metres tall. That ratio is the whole story of this cedar: it has spent its life spreading rather than climbing, and no thicker trunk appears anywhere in the national register's entries for Caserta. It stands in the flat southern end of the English Garden, the stretch the royal gardeners called the Palco, which holds more oversized trees per hectare than the rest of the park put together. Cedar of Lebanon reached western Europe in the seventeenth century as a curiosity out of the mountains of Lebanon and Syria, where the species is now down to scattered protected groves after three thousand years of cutting for temples, palaces and ships. In a Campanian garden fed by the Carolino aqueduct it grows faster and wider than it ever would at home, which is what you are looking at. The garden around it was laid out from 1786 by John Andrew Graefer, an English gardener sent over on the recommendation of the Royal Society, for a queen who wanted something less geometric than the rest of the park. Both registers put the tree at over 150 years without being more precise, so it belongs somewhere between the first planting and the Victorian expansion.
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2
The Plane That Grew Sideways
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · over 150 years · Giardino Inglese, il Palco
This tree is too small to qualify and the register listed it anyway. Campania asks a plane for four metres of trunk before it counts as monumental; this one has two metres sixty and stands nine metres tall, and it got in on the strength of a crown twenty-five metres across. The regional record calls it among the most beautiful and most photographed plants in the English Garden, which is an unusual thing for a government form to say about anything. The branching is what makes it. Instead of one trunk driving upward, the limbs leave low and travel outward in long sinuous curves that cross and interlace, so the tree reads as a wide low room rather than a column, and visitors come to it on purpose. The old royal gardeners knew it as the Indian plane, which it is not: Platanus x acerifolia is a seventeenth-century hybrid of the Oriental and American planes, and its bark flakes off in fine plates to leave the grey, cream and brown patchwork the species is known for. Come in January or February. With the leaves off, the whole tangle of branches is visible, and that is the only time of year you can see what the shape is actually doing.
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3
The Yew of the Bath of Venus
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · the register says 150 years, its own note implies 250 or more · Giardino Inglese, Bagno di Venere
This yew was already a grown tree when it was carried into the garden, which makes it older than the garden. The Campania register is explicit: the specimen was mature when it was set in place at the creation of the English Garden in the 1790s, and it calls the tree one of the patriarchs of the whole design. That is also why the age field on the same record, which says 150 years, cannot be right, and it is stated here as the disagreement it is. Nearly four metres round the trunk and twenty metres tall, it stands at the Bath of Venus, the grotto at the top of the garden where a Carrara marble Venus by Tommaso Solari, carved in 1762 and installed here around 1840, crouches on a rock above a pool. The Reggia's own description of the place records that the water surrounding the statue rises from the base of a monumental yew. That is this tree. Yew is the slowest-growing timber tree in Europe and among the longest-lived, which is exactly why an eighteenth-century designer would move a mature one rather than plant a sapling and wait. The boulders, the ferns and the ruined cryptoporticus behind it were all built to look accidental. The yew is the only part that is not.
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4
The Douglas Fir of the English Garden
Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) · the register says about 200 years, which is the outer edge of possible · Giardino Inglese, il Palco
At forty metres, only one other tree in Caserta's register stands as tall, and this one's stated age does not quite work. The Campania register gives it about two hundred years, which would mean a planting around 1826. David Douglas did not send the first seed of the species back from the Pacific Northwest until 1827, and it spread through European gardens over the decades that followed, so two hundred is the outer edge of what is possible and is more likely a round number than a measurement. The tree itself is not in doubt. Five metres eighty around the trunk, forty metres of it, with the thick corky grey bark split into broad plates, which is armour: in its native range the species survives ground fire that kills its neighbours because that bark insulates the trunk. Douglas fir is the timber tree of the American west, the one that built ships, bridges and most of Oregon, and nineteenth-century Europe planted it hard for exactly that reason. Here it does no work at all. It stands in the middle of a landscape garden designed to look wild and engineered to the last stone, alongside a cedar, a cork oak and a plane from three other continents, all of them collected for a queen who wanted a botanical garden and got one.
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5
The Sweet Osmanthus of the Winding Path
Sweet Osmanthus (Osmanthus fragrans) · about 150 years · Giardino Inglese
The national register credits this tree with six and a half metres of trunk. The regional one adds the detail that makes sense of it: that figure is every stem added together, not one trunk, because Osmanthus fragrans grows as a bundle rather than a column. It is ten metres tall, which is large for the species, and the register calls it a rarity in this climate. The reason to walk to it is the smell. For a few weeks in autumn a sweet osmanthus in flower puts out one of the strongest scents any hardy tree makes, apricot and ripe peach, carried well past the tree itself, and it comes from flowers so small you have to hunt for them: clusters of cream stars a few millimetres across, tucked into the leaf axils. In China, where the species comes from, those flowers are picked for tea, for wine and for sweets, and the city of Guilin takes its name from them. Graefer and the botanists who followed him were buying novelty from the far side of the world for a queen who wanted her garden to beat the other royal gardens of Europe. This is one of the few things they planted that a visitor notices without being told what it is.
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6
The Camphor Tree of the Palco
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · about 200 years · Giardino Inglese, il Palco
Thirty-eight metres is a strange height for a camphor tree. In Japan and southern China, where the species is native and where it is planted at shrines, it usually spreads wide and low. A camphor drawn up to thirty-eight metres has been competing for light its whole life, and this one stands in the most crowded corner of the English Garden, the low meadow the gardeners called the Palco, on the south-eastern side towards Puccianiello. The register puts it at about two hundred years, which places it with the first generation of the garden. Camphor is a laurel, and the whole tree smells. Crush a leaf and you get the entire medicine cabinet, because the wood and foliage are the historic source of camphor itself, distilled for centuries for embalming, moth-proofing, liniment and, for a few decades, smokeless gunpowder. The chemistry is a defence, which is why camphor timber resists insects and why it was cut in enormous quantity in Taiwan and Japan until synthetic camphor arrived and the trade collapsed. This one was never cut. Its bark is fissured in long vertical lines, its new leaves flush bronze before turning glossy, and it is not alone: the Reggia has more camphors elsewhere in the park, including a row of eight nearer the palace.
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7
The Cork Oak of the Palco
Cork Oak (Quercus suber) · over 150 years · Giardino Inglese, il Palco
This is the one tree on the walk you can put a hand on and be surprised. Cork oak grows an outer bark up to thirty centimetres thick, spongy and slightly warm to the touch, and it is the only European tree whose bark regenerates completely after being stripped, which is why Portugal and Spain harvest it on a nine-year cycle for wine corks and floor tiles. Four metres twenty around the trunk and twenty-eight metres tall, this one has never been harvested. A stripped cork oak carries a smooth ochre trunk for years afterwards, so the deep fissured layer here is the mark of a tree left alone since it was planted. The register adds something worth knowing: several smaller cork oaks stand scattered around it in no pattern at all, which is what happens when an old tree in an irrigated garden is left long enough to seed itself. The bark is also why the species survives fire across the Iberian dehesa. It insulates the trunk well enough that the tree comes back from a burn that kills everything around it, a useful thing to have evolved in a landscape people have been burning for grazing for four thousand years. In a garden of imported curiosities, this one is a Mediterranean native doing what it does at home.
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8
The Coast Redwood of the English Garden
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · over 150 years · Giardino Inglese
Redwoods do not usually reach four and a half metres of trunk this fast. On the fog-fed Pacific coast where Sequoia sempervirens is native, that girth marks a tree several centuries old; this one did it in about a hundred and fifty years, on the far side of the planet from northern California. The Campania forestry register does not date it by ring count. It reasons the age instead: past 4.69 metres around the trunk the species already clears the regional threshold for monumental status, and the tree went into the ground with the rest of the English Garden's plantings, so a century and a half follows from the garden's own history rather than a direct measurement. Twenty-six metres up, little about the tree reads as Mediterranean. The bark is the giveaway: deep, spongy, fissured red-brown, built to shrug off fire in a climate this garden has never had to test it against. Coast redwood is one of the tallest living things on the planet and one of the newer arrivals in this eighteenth-century garden, added long after the original 1786 layout that John Graefer designed for Queen Maria Carolina. It shares no relation with anything else on this list, which is exactly the point of a garden built to hold one of everything.
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9
The Chilgoza Pine of the English Garden
Chilgoza Pine (Pinus gerardiana) · about 150 years · Giardino Inglese
Two trees in Caserta's monumental register share the title of tallest, and this pine is one of them: forty metres, tied with the Douglas fir a short walk away. Pinus gerardiana is a strange choice for a European garden. It grows wild only in the dry inner valleys of the north-west Himalaya, across Pakistan, Afghanistan and northern India, where its seeds, chilgoza pine nuts, are a real harvested crop rather than a curiosity, sold by weight in markets from Kabul to Delhi. Almost nothing else in cultivated Europe reaches this size; most specimens outside the species' native range stay ornamental and modest. This one has a girth of three metres ten, respectable rather than remarkable next to the garden's giant cedars and redwoods, and the height is the whole story: whoever planted it, sometime in the century and a half the register credits it with, gave it the room and the time to do something the species rarely gets to do this far from the mountains it comes from. The needles grow in bundles of three, unusually long, and the cones take two full years to ripen the seeds inside them. Nobody has recorded checking whether it still fruits this far from home, but if it does, autumn is when to look.
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10
The Second Plane of the English Garden
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · over 150 years · Giardino Inglese
Caserta's monumental register credits only one tree in the entire city with a wider trunk than this one, the cedar of Lebanon at the far end of the same garden. This plane measures seven metres twenty around, which makes it the widest broadleaf tree the register has found anywhere in Caserta, plane, oak or otherwise. Platanus x acerifolia lines half of Europe's boulevards as a pollarded street tree kept small on purpose; nothing gets this wide doing that job. This one has had the opposite treatment since the English Garden's layout went in for Queen Maria Carolina in 1786: room, undisturbed roots, and nobody ever cutting it back. Twenty-five metres tall, in the lower stretch of the garden closest to the palace, the section finished first and given the longest run of any part of the grounds to grow into itself. It carries none of the low, sinuous branching that makes its garden-mate near the entrance famous for its shape. This one went straight up and simply kept getting wider, plain in form and enormous in scale, a different argument for the same species.
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11
The Third Plane of the English Garden
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 150 years · Giardino Inglese
Caserta's monumental register now credits this garden with three London planes, and this one is the third thickest tree in the whole city register regardless of species, five metres sixty around and thirty metres tall. Only the cedar of Lebanon by the Palco and the garden's other giant plane, near the entrance, beat it.
The English Garden was laid out for Queen Maria Carolina starting in 1786, one of the first landscape gardens of its kind on the European continent, informal and winding where the rest of the Reggia's grounds run in strict Baroque lines. Three planes surviving from roughly the same planting era says something about the site more than about any one tree: deep soil, an unbroken water supply from the garden's own network of streams and pools, and two and a half centuries without the hard pruning street planes usually get. Left alone, Platanus x acerifolia does not stay a tidy shape, it becomes what stands here, a straight trunk carrying a huge, high canopy.
The register puts its age at roughly 150 years, later than the garden's founding but still older than the unification of Italy. Free to see once inside; the garden itself is a paid section of the wider Reggia grounds.
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12
The Araucaria of Piazza Vanvitelli
Monkey Puzzle (Araucaria araucana) · over 200 years · Caserta town centre
Every other tree on this page stands behind a ticket gate. This one grows in the middle of Caserta's own civic square, free for anyone to walk up to, a Chilean monkey puzzle 330 centimetres around and 25 metres tall with the palace itself visible over its crown.
Piazza Vanvitelli used to be the town's market square before it became a public garden in the late 1800s, planted in two phases and then reworked again in 1995 to recover the original specimens. Campania's own monumental register ties this tree's age directly to that first planting, putting it at over 200 years, among the oldest trees this city protects and one of the very few outside the Reggia's grounds.
Araucaria araucana is native to the volcanic slopes of Chile and Argentina, its stiff, spiralled, spine-tipped leaves an adaptation against browsing dinosaurs that vanished tens of millions of years before anyone planted one in a European market square. It shares this square with a casuarina and a yew, both also on the region's monumental list, all three within fifty metres of each other on ground that costs nothing to visit.
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The Casuarina of Piazza Vanvitelli
Horsetail Casuarina (Casuarina equisetifolia) · Caserta town centre
Casuarina equisetifolia looks like a conifer and is not one. The drooping, needle-like growths that give it a pine's silhouette are jointed green stems; the actual leaves are reduced to tiny scales at each joint, an adaptation from its native coastlines of Australia and the Pacific islands, where the species holds sand dunes together in wind that would strip a broadleaf tree bare. In the centre of Piazza Vanvitelli, Caserta's town square, it just looks like an unusually feathery pine.
Campania's monumental register measures its trunk at 270 centimetres, close to the minimum three metre threshold the region sets for the species and, together with its 15 metre height and its age, enough to earn it protected status. Like its two square-mates, the araucaria and the yew nearby, its planting is tied to the square's own history: laid out in phases from the late nineteenth century, on ground that had been Caserta's market square before that.
A casuarina this size, this far from a coastline, is a small oddity in its own right. It costs nothing to see, stands in the open square rather than behind any gate, and shares its fifty metres of ground with two other protected trees.
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The Yew of Piazza Vanvitelli
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · Caserta town centre
A European yew in a flower bed on Piazza Vanvitelli is easy to miss next to its two showier square-mates, the monkey puzzle and the feathery casuarina a few steps away. It is no less protected: Campania's monumental register measures its trunk at 270 centimetres, well past the 250 centimetre minimum the region sets for the species, on a tree only 12 metres tall.
That gap between girth and height is normal for a yew. The species grows slowly and thickens for centuries after most trees would have stopped, which is exactly why an unremarkable-looking specimen can carry an old trunk. The register ties this one's age to the square's own history rather than giving a number, the same reasoning it gives the araucaria and casuarina nearby: planted when Piazza Vanvitelli was first laid out as a garden, on what had been the town's market square before.
Free, outdoors, and in a civic square rather than behind the Reggia's paid gate, this yew and its two neighbours are the only entries on this page that cost nothing to see.
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The Bottle Tree of the English Garden
Bottle Tree (Brachychiton populneus) · about 150 years · Giardino Inglese
An Australian bottle tree, also called a kurrajong at home, stands thirty-five metres tall in a Bourbon queen's garden, roughly twice the height the species usually reaches. Brachychiton populneus grows across the dry eastern half of Australia, where most specimens top out somewhere between fifteen and twenty metres. The register puts this one at thirty-five, with three metres sixty around the trunk, which makes it an exceptional tree for the species by a wide margin.
Kurrajong belongs to the mallow family, alongside cotton, cacao and the baobab, and it shares the baobab's habit of storing water in a swollen trunk. Australian graziers cut the branches to feed stock through drought, the fibrous bark was worked into cord, and the seeds are edible once roasted. None of that has ever been asked of this one. It stands in the English Garden at the top of the Reggia's grounds, the informal twenty-three hectares laid out from 1786 for a queen who wanted a botanical collection rather than another parterre, and it has spent its whole life being watered by an aqueduct and looked at.
The Campania register credits it with about a hundred and fifty years. That figure is the register's own estimate rather than a ring count, and the national list carries the same trunk, the same height and no age at all.
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16
The Himalayan Chir Pine of the English Garden
Chir Pine (Pinus roxburghii) · about 150 years · Giardino Inglese
The chir pine is tapped for resin on Himalayan foothills from Pakistan to Nepal, and one of them grows in the garden of a Bourbon palace outside Naples. Pinus roxburghii is a tree of dry slopes between roughly 500 and 2,000 metres, where whole local economies run on it: resin for turpentine and rosin, timber for building, and needles swept up in quantity for fodder, fuel and bedding. Those needles are among the longest of any pine, up to thirty centimetres, carried in drooping bundles of three, so the crown reads looser and shaggier than any European pine standing near it.
This one is twenty-five metres tall with three metres fifty around the trunk. A Himalayan pine is not garden decoration, it is a collector's tree, and the English Garden spent much of the nineteenth century working as a botanical collection under Giovanni Gussone and later Nicola Terracciano, who filled it with species nobody in Campania had grown before. The queen it was built for in 1786 wanted a garden that would beat the other royal gardens of Europe, and the botanists who came after her kept buying.
The register puts the pine at about a hundred and fifty years and marks the number as an estimate. Nothing in this garden has been dated by counting rings, so read it as a period rather than a date.
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The Turkey Oak of the English Garden
Turkey Oak (Quercus cerris) · about 150 years · Giardino Inglese
In a garden collected out of Australia, the Himalaya and California, this oak grows wild in the hills a few kilometres away. Quercus cerris is native across southern Europe and Asia Minor, and grand gardens of the nineteenth century planted it anyway, because it grows faster than almost any other oak and reaches size while the owner is still alive to see it. This one is thirty-five metres tall with three metres forty-five around the trunk.
It is easy to identify once you look down. The acorn cups are covered in long whiskery scales, shaggy as a thistle head, and the acorns take two seasons to ripen instead of one. The leaves are rough to the touch, deeply and irregularly cut, and many of them hang on brown into the winter.
What the tree has watched from this spot is the end of a dynasty. The English Garden was Bourbon royal property for its first seventy years, laid out from 1786 and stocked with imports for a queen. In 1860 the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies fell, and the palace and its grounds passed to the House of Savoy and then to the Italian state, which is who charges for the ticket today. The register's hundred and fifty years is an estimate rather than a measurement, so this oak may have arrived just before that change of ownership or just after it.
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18
The Southern Magnolia of Piazza Carlo di Borbone
Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) · about 150 years · Reggia di Caserta grounds
Four metres forty around the trunk is a great deal of magnolia, and this one asks nobody for a ticket. It grows on Piazza Carlo di Borbone, the elliptical square in front of the Reggia, rather than behind the wall of the English Garden up the hill, twenty-five metres tall and open to anyone at any hour.
Magnolia grandiflora comes from the warm southeastern United States and has been planted as a specimen tree across Europe since the middle of the eighteenth century, for two reasons. The leaves stay on all year, dark and leathery on top with a rust-coloured felt underneath that is worth turning one over to see. And the flowers are enormous, cream white, up to thirty centimetres across and scented of lemon, opening a few at a time through the summer rather than all at once, so the tree is never covered in them and never quite out of them either.
The building behind it has had a stranger life than the tree. By 1944 the palace was Allied headquarters in the Mediterranean, and on 29 April 1945 the surrender of German forces in Italy was signed inside it. The magnolia was well grown by then: the Campania register credits it with about a hundred and fifty years, an estimate rather than a recorded planting date, which would have made it roughly eighty years old on the morning of the signing.
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The Upright Osage Orange of the English Garden
Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) · about 200 years · Giardino Inglese, upper garden
The best bow wood in North America grows in a royal garden outside Naples. Maclura pomifera takes its English name from the Osage nation, whose bows were traded far beyond their own country, and the wood behind that reputation is heavy, springy and so rot-resistant that a fence post cut from it outlasts the fence. Before barbed wire, American farmers planted the tree in thorny hedgerows across thousands of miles of the Midwest.
The fruit is the reason to come in autumn. Each one is the size of a grapefruit, green, wrinkled like a brain, heavy enough to be worth not parking under, full of sticky white latex and eaten by almost nothing alive. One well-argued theory holds that its dispersers were the mastodons and giant ground sloths that disappeared from North America some thirteen thousand years ago, which would make every fruit dropped here an offer to a customer who no longer exists. They come down through September and October and lie where they land.
Two Osage oranges in this garden hold monumental status, and the register describes this one as the upright specimen: two metres sixty around the trunk, twenty-five metres tall, and about two hundred years old by the register's estimate. Taken at face value that puts it within thirty years of the garden's creation in 1786, which would make it one of the older residents of a collection built almost entirely out of foreigners.
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The Hackberry of the English Garden
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · about 200 years · Giardino Inglese
Ancient writers put this tree forward as the lotus that made Odysseus's crew forget the way home. Celtis australis carries small dark fruit on long stalks, sweet and vaguely date-like when ripe, which is enough to keep the identification alive; a thorny North African shrub, Ziziphus lotus, has an equally old claim on the same story, and nobody has settled it.
The wood is not in dispute. Hackberry is hard and flexible in a way few Mediterranean broadleaves are, and Italian workshops turned it for centuries into tool handles, walking sticks, whip stocks and the long forks used for turning hay. It is also one of the standard shade trees of the Italian piazza, planted for a wide canopy and for roots that put up with being paved over.
This one has been asked to do neither job. Three metres fifty around the trunk and twenty-five metres tall, it stands in the English Garden among kurrajongs, redwoods and Himalayan pines, which is an odd room for a species most Italians walk past without looking up. The trees around it were shipped in from four continents for a queen who wanted a collection. The hackberry needed no shipping at all: the species grows wild across Italy and through the Mediterranean basin. The register gives it about two hundred years, an estimate rather than a count, which makes it one of the longer-standing things in a garden laid out from 1786.
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