What is the oldest tree in Padova?

The Goethe Palm, a dwarf fan palm in the Orto Botanico planted in 1585 and about 440 years old, kept alive through Padova's winters inside its own glass enclosure.

Can you walk between Padova's oldest trees?

Mostly. The Orto Botanico and the Basilica di Sant'Antonio cloister sit within a few hundred metres of each other. Parco Treves is about a kilometre north of the garden, and Piazza Capitaniato, near the university's historic centre, closes a loop of just over a kilometre across the whole list.

Do they cost anything to see?

The Orto Botanico charges admission, which covers the Goethe Palm, the plane, the ginkgo and the 1786 magnolia. The magnolia in the Sant'Antonio cloister, Parco Treves and Piazza Capitaniato are all free, open public ground.

Which has the best story?

The Goethe Palm. A single dwarf palm helped inspire one of Goethe's botanical theories, then had a female branch grafted onto its male trunk decades later, so it now flowers and fruits from the same stem.

Italy

Ancient Trees in Padova

Padova's oldest trees mostly answer to a university. The Orto Botanico, founded in 1545 as the world's first university botanical garden, still holds four of the plantings that made it famous, including a dwarf palm Goethe wrote a book around. A magnolia grows sideways in a cloister behind the Basilica di Sant'Antonio, two planes and a sideways hackberry share a public park a mile away, and a pair of pagoda trees mark a university courtyard that has stood since the 1300s. Every one of them sits inside a walk of just over a kilometre.

The Goethe Palm

European Fan Palm / Saint Peter's Palm (Chamaerops humilis) · roughly 440 years · Orto Botanico (UNESCO World Heritage botanical garden, founded 1545)

Goethe walked through this garden in 1786, stopped at a palm, and left with the beginnings of a theory. He was working towards his essay on the metamorphosis of plants, the argument that every organ of a plant is a modified leaf, and this dwarf fan palm, whose fronds change shape as they climb the stem, is the specimen credited with helping the idea along. It has been in the ground since 1585, one of the first plants set out after the Orto Botanico was founded in 1545, which makes it roughly 440 years old. Chamaerops humilis is a Mediterranean plant with no patience for Veneto frost, so the garden built a glass house around it, an octagonal greenhouse raised to fit one shrub. Up close it is not a single trunk but a clump of about 25 stems, each roughly half a metre round, 4.5 metres of girth in total. The Italian register rates its health as good, last checked in July 2026, and files it under a second name, the Palm of Saint Peter, which is what Padova called it long before a German poet turned up. A panel beside the glass tells the visitor the rest. It is the least imposing tree on this list and the only one that ended up in a book about how plants are put together.

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The Oriental Plane of the Orto Botanico

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · roughly 345 years · Orto Botanico (arboretum section)

Lightning opened this plane from the base upward and it kept going. The trunk is hollow, a shell you can see into, and the tree still leafs out every spring, because the tissue that carries water sits in the outer wood rather than the core. It went into the ground in 1680 according to the garden's own visitor leaflet, which puts it at about 345 years, and it has been measured at 6.2 metres round and nearly 25 metres tall. Worth being precise about the species: this is Platanus orientalis, the eastern plane, native in Italy only in a few pockets of Calabria and Sicily. Almost every tree called a plane in a European city, including two others on this list, is the hybrid that came later. The date rests on that leaflet and on Italian garden-history sources agreeing on the same two details, the 1680 planting and the lightning strike, rather than on a second register entry, so read it as well corroborated rather than documented twice. What the tree's first century looked like from here: Venice still ruled Padova and had another hundred years of republic left, and the botanical garden around it was already 135 years old and busy cataloguing plants arriving from the Americas. The register rates its condition as good.

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The Grafted Ginkgo of the Orto Botanico

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · roughly 275 years · Orto Botanico

Somebody grafted a female branch onto this male ginkgo in the middle of the 19th century, so one tree here sheds pollen in spring and drops fruit in autumn from the same trunk. Ginkgos are normally one sex or the other, and the female fruit is famous for smelling like something died, so the graft was either a teaching exercise or a practical joke that has outlived everyone involved. The tree was planted in 1750, among the first of its kind brought to Italy. The garden's register goes further and says it may have been the first in the country and the second in Europe, after a tree planted in Utrecht in 1727; treat that as the register's claim rather than a settled fact. It stands 17 to 20 metres tall on a trunk four metres round. The species is the last survivor of an order of plants that was widespread before the dinosaurs and had been reduced to a few cultivated Chinese groves by the time European collectors found it, a biography nothing else in this garden can match. The register rates its condition as adequate rather than good, last checked in July 2026, so this is not a tree without problems. Come in November anyway.

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The 1786 Magnolia of the Orto Botanico

Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) · roughly 240 years · Orto Botanico (arboretum)

This magnolia was planted in 1786, the same year Goethe came through the gate. It is one of the first Magnolia grandiflora set out in Italy, reportedly among the oldest still standing anywhere in Europe, and it has been in this arboretum for 240 years, spreading a crown about 13 metres across. The species had reached Europe from the American southeast only a few decades earlier, and a botanical garden's job in the 1780s was exactly this: get the new plant into the ground and find out whether it survives the winter. It did. Its girth is a small lesson in reading registers. One file gives 2.22 metres, from a document the register itself flags as needing an update, while a 2026 remeasurement gives 2.54 metres. Trees do not shrink, so the older figure is the one to distrust. Southern magnolia is evergreen, dark and leathery the whole year, which makes the flowering the event: cream-white, lemon-scented, the size of a dinner plate, opening a few at a time so the tree is never covered at once and never quite finished either. Padova's other famous magnolia, 300 metres away in a cloister at the Basilica, is a different tree planted a generation later. The two get confused constantly, including by sources that should know better.

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The Magnolia of the Saint

Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) · roughly 215 years · Piazza del Santo, adjoining the Basilica di Sant'Antonio

The cloister is named after the tree. The Chiostro della Magnolia is the first courtyard of the Basilica di Sant'Antonio, the 13th-century pilgrimage church that has drawn visitors to Padova for 800 years, and the magnolia at its centre was planted in 1810 according to the Basilica's own account. That makes it about 215 years old, 25 metres tall and 4.4 metres round, listed on Italy's national register of monumental trees under its own code. What makes it worth the ticket is the habit. The branches leave the trunk low and several of them rest on the ground, so instead of a column with a crown on top you get a green room with walls, filling most of the courtyard. The tree went in while northern Italy was still being fought over by France and Austria, and it has grown in the same enclosed square of air ever since, sheltered on four sides by stone, which is roughly why a magnolia from Georgia and Florida has done so well this far north. Do not confuse it with the 1786 magnolia in the Orto Botanico, 300 metres south. Padova has three well-known magnolias carrying three different dates and the sources muddle them regularly. This is the one inside the Basilica's museum complex, reached on the combined ticket, and closed on Mondays.

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The Great Plane of Parco Treves

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) · roughly 155 years · Parco Treves de' Bonfili, on Padova's 16th-century Venetian walls

Forty-eight metres. That is what put this plane on Italy's national register of monumental trees, not its age, which at roughly 155 years is fairly ordinary for the species. It stands in Parco Treves de' Bonfili, a small park built on Padova's 16th-century Venetian walls, and its trunk was measured at 6.37 metres round in 2022. The park is the reason it grew that way. Giuseppe Jappelli laid the ground out between 1829 and 1835 for the Treves de' Bonfili brothers as the first designed garden in Padova, part private botanical collection and part romantic landscape, planted for effect and for the long term by people who expected to be dead before it worked. Almost none of the built work survives: a neoclassical temple, the gardener's house and a small caryatid shrine, and that is the lot. The trees outlasted the architecture. The register rates this one's condition as adequate rather than good, which at 48 metres and nearly two centuries is not a surprise, and is worth knowing before you stand under it in a wind. Two more registered trees stand within 60 metres of it, a second plane and a leaning hackberry, which makes this the shortest worthwhile tree walk in the city: three protected trees, about ten minutes, no ticket.

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The Second Plane of Parco Treves

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) · roughly 150 years (undated by the register; estimated from its companion tree) · Parco Treves de' Bonfili

Nobody has dated this tree. It stands about 60 metres from the great plane of Parco Treves, carries its own code on the same national register of monumental trees, was measured at 5.05 metres round in 2022, and the age field on its record is simply empty. The 150 years given here is an inference from its neighbour, which stands in the same park and was almost certainly planted with it, and should be read as an estimate rather than a fact. Everything else is confirmed twice over: species, position, protected status. It is the second largest of the park's planes and, unlike the largest, the register rates its condition as good, so the smaller tree is the healthier one. Both grew up inside a garden Giuseppe Jappelli designed in the 1830s to look like landscape rather than a park, and both lived through the century in which Padova's ramparts stopped being defences and became somewhere to walk the dog. The pair are worth seeing together for the comparison alone: same species, same soil, same start, five metres of trunk against six and a half. Trees that begin together rarely finish the same size, and standing between these two is the clearest way to see how much of a tree's life is decided by where it happened to land.

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The Leaning Hackberry of Parco Treves

Common Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) · not established by the register; mature/monumental by form rather than measured age · Parco Treves de' Bonfili

This tree is on Italy's national register for being the wrong shape. The bagolaro sdraiato, the reclining hackberry of Parco Treves, measures 1.6 metres round, which the register itself calls unremarkable for the species; it was designated for habit, form and landscape value instead of size. Rather than rising it leans, throwing its limbs out sideways and low over the grass. How it came to grow that way is not recorded. A local story about a storm circulates, but the register says nothing of it and we could not confirm it from any second source, so it stays a story until somebody proves otherwise. What is on file: no age at all, a condition rated adequate, and a national monumental code of its own, the fourth issued inside this one small park. Celtis occidentalis is a North American tree, common enough in Italian parks as a tough shade and street species, which makes the designation both stranger and better. Somebody in an office decided that a middling hackberry growing at an odd angle in a Jappelli garden deserved the same legal protection as trees ten times its size, and they were right. It is also the easiest of the park's three protected trees to walk straight past, which would be a waste of the detour.

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The Sophoras of Piazza Capitaniato

Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · roughly 165 years · Piazza Capitaniato, the University of Padova's historic Palazzo del Capitanio square · at its best now

These two trees were planted in 1861, when Padova was still Austrian. Five years later Veneto voted itself into the new kingdom of Italy, and the pagoda trees of Piazza Capitaniato have stood through everything since, in a square that was already six centuries into its second career. It began as the courtyard of the Carrara family's 14th-century palace and belongs to the University of Padova now, fronted by the Palazzo del Capitanio, open on all sides and free to walk into at any hour. The register counts two trees. A visitor counts one planting. They stand about 20 metres apart on the square's axis, the larger 4.6 metres round and dated to that 1861 campaign, the second undated on the register and in better condition than its neighbour, which is why they are described here as one entry. Local history sources give the same planting year independently, and the arithmetic agrees. Styphnolobium japonicum reached Europe from China by way of Jesuit collectors, despite the name, and its trick is timing: it flowers in August, when almost nothing else in a city square is doing anything at all, dropping small cream flowers over the paving for weeks. Padova's students have walked through them on the way to lectures since before Italy existed.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Padova?: The Goethe Palm, a dwarf fan palm in the Orto Botanico planted in 1585 and about 440 years old, kept alive through Padova's winters inside its own glass enclosure.
Can you walk between Padova's oldest trees?: Mostly. The Orto Botanico and the Basilica di Sant'Antonio cloister sit within a few hundred metres of each other. Parco Treves is about a kilometre north of the garden, and Piazza Capitaniato, near the university's historic centre, closes a loop of just over a kilometre across the whole list.
Do they cost anything to see?: The Orto Botanico charges admission, which covers the Goethe Palm, the plane, the ginkgo and the 1786 magnolia. The magnolia in the Sant'Antonio cloister, Parco Treves and Piazza Capitaniato are all free, open public ground.
Which has the best story?: The Goethe Palm. A single dwarf palm helped inspire one of Goethe's botanical theories, then had a female branch grafted onto its male trunk decades later, so it now flowers and fruits from the same stem.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Padova? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Browse themed collections of remarkable trees.
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Walk all 9 trees about 2.6 km, 35 min on foot