The Cook Pine of Villa Tasca

Villa Tasca's swan lake has a fig tree spreading permanent shade over one shore and a very different tree standing on the other: a Cook pine, thirty-eight metres tall by the national register's own measurement, growing in the narrow, leaning column that gives the species its slightly off-kilter look in photographs. Araucaria columnaris comes from a single small stretch of the Pacific, New Caledonia's Isle of Pines, where eighteenth century European sailors mistook whole hillsides of the tree for a colonnade of stone columns and gave the island its name because of it. Palermo's specimen has travelled a long way from that coastline to end up leaning over a Sicilian swan lake instead. Nobody has published an age for this tree, and no story about it should invent one. What is documented is the girth, three metres seventy, and the company it keeps: a Norfolk Island pine stands 35 metres away, a different species entirely despite the family resemblance, and the two of them frame the same lake that the garden's famous fig dominates from the opposite bank.