What is the oldest tree in Padua?

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

Can you walk between Padua'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. The Eremitani cypress adds about half a kilometre to the north-east of Piazza Capitaniato. The one exception is the plane at the Certosa di Vigodarzere, about 6 km north on the Brenta, a bike ride or a longer walk along the river embankment.

Do they cost anything to see?

The Orto Botanico charges admission, which covers the Goethe Palm, the plane, the ginkgo, the 1786 magnolia, the Himalayan cedar, a Japanese cedar reportedly planted in 1850 and a second ginkgo elsewhere in the grounds. Parco Treves and Piazza Capitaniato are free, open public ground; the magnolia in the Sant'Antonio cloister needs the basilica's museum ticket. The Eremitani cypress is seen free from the street, and the Vigodarzere plane from the lane beside the Certosa.

Which has the best story?

The Goethe Palm. A single dwarf palm, planted in 1585, helped inspire one of Goethe's botanical theories and still stands in its own glasshouse.

Italy

Ancient Trees in Padua

Padua's oldest trees mostly answer to a university. The Orto Botanico, founded in 1545 as the world's first university botanical garden, holds seven of them, including a dwarf palm Goethe wrote a book around. A magnolia grows sideways in the Sant'Antonio cloister, two planes and a hackberry share a public park, pagoda trees mark a medieval university courtyard, and a cypress planted for a Canova urn came through the 1944 bombing of the Eremitani church. Six kilometres north, a plane six metres round stands alone beside an abandoned monastery on the Brenta.

Highlights

The Goethe Palm

European Fan Palm / Saint Peter's Palm · 440 years

Photo: Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Oriental Plane of the Orto Botanico

Oriental Plane · 345 years

Photo: lejones417 (CC BY-SA)

Autumn colour

The Grafted Ginkgo of the Orto Botanico

Ginkgo · 275 years

Photo: lejones417 (CC BY-SA)

The Magnolia of the Saint

Southern Magnolia · 215 years

Photo: Tournasol7 (CC BY 4.0)

The Canova Cypress of the Eremitani

Mediterranean Cypress · 200 years

Photo: un albero al giorno

The Plane of the Certosa di Vigodarzere

London Plane

Photo: un albero al giorno

All 14 trees

The Goethe Palm

European Fan Palm / Saint Peter's Palm · 440 years

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 Padua 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.

Photo: Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Oriental Plane of the Orto Botanico

Oriental Plane · 345 years

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 Padua 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.

Photo: lejones417 (CC BY-SA)

Autumn colour

The Grafted Ginkgo of the Orto Botanico

Ginkgo · 275 years

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.

Photo: lejones417 (CC BY-SA)

The 1786 Magnolia of the Orto Botanico

Southern Magnolia · 240 years

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. Padua'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.

The Magnolia of the Saint

Southern Magnolia · 215 years

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 Padua 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. Padua 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.

Photo: Tournasol7 (CC BY 4.0)

The Great Plane of Parco Treves

London Plane · 155 years

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 Padua'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 Padua, 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 some 150 years 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.

The Second Plane of Parco Treves

London Plane · 150 years

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 Padua'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.

The Leaning Hackberry of Parco Treves

Common Hackberry

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.

The Sophoras of Piazza Capitaniato

Japanese Pagoda Tree · 165 years

These two trees were planted in 1861, when Padua 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 Padua 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. Padua's students have walked through them on the way to lectures since before Italy existed.

The Himalayan Cedar of the Orto Botanico

Himalayan Cedar · 198 years

The species reached Europe in 1822, and six years later this specimen went into the ground here, the first Cedrus deodara cultivated anywhere in Italy. The garden's own account places it between the Montagnola, an artificial hill built in the 1700s, and the Fontana delle Quattro Stagioni, and every subsequent deodar cedar planted anywhere in the country traces back to trees like this one. A deodar cedar in its native Himalaya grows at 1,200 to 3,500 metres, on mountainsides far colder in winter than the Veneto plain, which is part of why it took to cultivation here so readily. Two centuries on, it stands about four and a half metres round, one of the older conifers in an arboretum that also holds Atlas cedars and cedars of Lebanon for comparison, a planted lesson in how the genus Cedrus split across three separate mountain ranges. The honest note: Italy's monumental tree register rates this specimen's current health as poor, the kind of assessment that means paying attention rather than staying away. Nearly two hundred years old and first of its kind in the country is a lot of biography for one tree to carry, and it is carrying it into old age rather than out of it.

The Cryptomeria of the Orto Botanico

Japanese Cedar · 175 years

A slim trunk for its reported age: this Japanese cedar is said to have gone into Padua's botanical garden in 1850, which would make it around 175 years old, and eighty three centimetres of girth is a modest showing for a tree that has had that long. The register that records it hedges its own date with 'sarebbe', reportedly, rather than stating it as fact, and a local tree blog independently places the same aged specimen on the path leading to the garden's ticket office without adding a firmer date of its own. Cryptomeria japonica is Japan's national tree, valued there for straight-grained timber and planted from temple groves to reforested hillsides; in a European botanical garden it usually arrived as a curiosity from the same wave of 19th-century plant collecting that filled Padua's grounds with a magnolia from 1786 and a grafted ginkgo said to date to 1750. This one stands within a few dozen metres of both, plus an oriental plane, part of the same cluster near the garden's main path. The garden charges standard admission, the oldest botanical garden of its kind still on its original site anywhere in the world. If the 1850 date is more than a working guess, tell us.

Autumn colour

The Second Ginkgo of the Orto Botanico

Ginkgo

Padua's botanical garden has two ginkgos worth stopping for, and both carry the same odd trick: a female branch grafted onto a male tree, so a single trunk produces the messy, foul-smelling fruit that an all-male ginkgo never would. The more famous of the pair is dated to 1750. This is the second, the register's own 'Ginko dell'Orto Botanico n. 2', a separate three-metre-round tree with no planting date of its own on record. Ginkgo biloba is dioecious, meaning a tree is born strictly male or strictly female, and European gardens have grafted female branches onto male specimens since at least the 18th century, partly out of curiosity and partly because male trees were what nurseries could reliably supply. Both of Padua's ginkgos wear the graft, which makes this garden an unusually direct place to see the trick performed twice. Seventeen metres tall on a three-metre girth, it stands within a stone's throw of the garden's better-known ginkgo, inside grounds that require standard admission. Nobody has recorded when it went in. If you know, say so.

The Canova Cypress of the Eremitani

Mediterranean Cypress · 200 years

The cypress behind the apse of the Eremitani church has outlived the monument it was planted to shade. In late summer 1807 a cinerary urn carved by Antonio Canova for Countess Louise von Callenberg reached Padua and was set in a small cemetery here, and the Diocese of Padua says this cypress was planted for it. The Paduan tree blog un albero al giorno thinks the tree was probably standing already. On 11 March 1944 American bombs mutilated the church and took most of Mantegna's frescoes in its Ovetari chapel, and Canova's monument was lost. The urn was counted among the losses until it was found in the church's rectory, two years before it went on show for the first time in 2025. The cypress stayed. Its trunk has lost the outer, stringy bark a cypress normally wears, and it leans east, both of which the blog's author reads as the work of the blast. By his own tape it is about 15 metres tall and two metres round, and the diocese puts it at more than 200 years. An 1831 illustration by Pietro Chevalier and a later watercolour by Bartolomeo Belzoni in the city library show it already tall, and in 2024 Michele Armelin gave it a book of its own. A high wall hides the trunk today, so look for the dark spire against the brick apse from the street.

Photo: un albero al giorno

The Plane of the Certosa di Vigodarzere

London Plane

Six and a quarter metres round and 32 metres tall, by Italy's national register of monumental trees, this London plane stands by itself in a ploughed field in a bend of the Brenta, with an empty Carthusian monastery for company. Work on the Certosa di Vigodarzere began in 1534 under Andrea Moroni, who also directed the building of Santa Giustina in Padua, and Carthusian monks lived here from 1560. A decree of the Venetian Republic closed the house in 1768, and the buildings went on to be a country villa, a farm, a barracks in the First World War and a powder store in the Second, according to the FAI. Today the complex is abandoned and cannot be visited, says the Paduan tree blog un albero al giorno, whose author photographed the plane here. The walk out is part of the reward. He describes crossing the Brenta bridge into Vigodarzere and following the cycle path along the top of the embankment upstream for under half an hour, then turning off on a track towards the Certosa. Round the buildings run a double row of old hornbeams and an avenue of limes towards the river, and then the plane appears out in the field. In the aerial pictures he took in the autumn of 2020 the whole crown had turned yellow. Nobody has published an age for it. If you know when it was planted, tell us.

Photo: un albero al giorno

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Padua?: The Goethe Palm, a dwarf fan palm in the Orto Botanico planted in 1585 and about 440 years old, kept alive through Padua's winters inside its own glass enclosure.
Can you walk between Padua'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. The Eremitani cypress adds about half a kilometre to the north-east of Piazza Capitaniato. The one exception is the plane at the Certosa di Vigodarzere, about 6 km north on the Brenta, a bike ride or a longer walk along the river embankment.
Do they cost anything to see?: The Orto Botanico charges admission, which covers the Goethe Palm, the plane, the ginkgo, the 1786 magnolia, the Himalayan cedar, a Japanese cedar reportedly planted in 1850 and a second ginkgo elsewhere in the grounds. Parco Treves and Piazza Capitaniato are free, open public ground; the magnolia in the Sant'Antonio cloister needs the basilica's museum ticket. The Eremitani cypress is seen free from the street, and the Vigodarzere plane from the lane beside the Certosa.
Which has the best story?: The Goethe Palm. A single dwarf palm, planted in 1585, helped inspire one of Goethe's botanical theories and still stands in its own glasshouse.
Species on this list: Every London Plane on the site
More like this: 2 of these trees also appear in Autumn Worth the Trip.
Ancient trees in nearby cities: Venice · Ferrara · Cerro Veronese · Verona · Passo Manghen · Trento · Bologna · Modena · Every city on the map

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