The 1786 Magnolia of the Orto Botanico

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.