The Leaning Hackberry of Parco Treves

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.