Wat is de oudste boom van Milan?

Milan has never been an easy city for an old tree to survive in. Wars, plague and relentless nineteenth and twentieth century redevelopment levelled most of what predates them, so almost nothing on this list is medieval. The one clear exception is the university's own ginkgo biloba pair, a male and a female planted together in 1775 when Abbot Fulgenzio Vitman was building the Orto Botanico di Brera for Empress Maria Theresa's new medical faculty, importing seed directly from China less than two decades after the species had reached Europe at all. Italy's monumental tree registry calculates their age from growth data at 235 years, a little short of the 251 years a straight planting-date count would give; this page states both rather than picking one, since the gap is exactly the kind of rounding error that comes from measuring a slow grower by two different methods. Either way, they are Milan's oldest trees by a wide margin over anything else here, and the garden marked their joint 250th anniversary with a public conference in March 2026.