What is the oldest tree in Padua?
Padua's oldest tree is the Goethe Palm (Palma di San Pietro), a dwarf fan palm in the city's Orto Botanico, planted in 1585 and roughly 440 years old. It grows inside a purpose-built octagonal glasshouse on Via Orto Botanico, a five-minute walk from the Basilica di Sant'Antonio, and it is one of the oldest potted or planted specimens still alive anywhere in the garden. The next oldest confirmed age on this page is the Oriental Plane in the same garden, at roughly 345 years.
The Orto Botanico di Padua, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1997, was founded in 1545 as the first university botanical garden in the world, and the Goethe Palm is one of the few plantings still alive from anywhere near its early centuries. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe saw it on his 1786 Italian journey and used it in his botanical writing on plant metamorphosis, which is why it carries his name alongside its older local one, the Palm of Saint Peter. In the mid-19th century a female branch was grafted onto the tree, so a single trunk now both sheds pollen and bears fruit, a detail botanists still point out. Padua's other old trees are younger and more ordinary in comparison: a garden magnolia, a pair of park planes, a hackberry the city protected for its shape rather than its size. None of them come close to the palm's four and a half centuries under glass.
One of Padua's trees also appears in Autumn Worth the Trip, a themed collection spanning several cities.