The Himalayan Cedar of the Orto Botanico

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.