The Cryptomeria of the Orto Botanico

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.