The Dragon Tree of Vivai Lo Porto

Palermo's largest dragon tree stands in a garden centre. Seven metres round the trunk, which is half a metre more than either of the two already on this page, and it grows behind the counter of Vivai Lo Porto on Corso Calatafimi rather than in a park. The nursery is the recent part. The ground it sits on was an eighteenth-century estate built for Monsignor Salvatore Ventimiglia di Belmonte, the last Inquisitor of Sicily, and a nineteenth-century garden of acclimatisation was laid out there long before the Lo Porto family started selling plants from it in 1960. The tree predates the business by a century at least. How long before that, nobody has written down. One source describes the neighbouring horse chestnut as three hundred years old and the Sterculia as over 150, and says nothing about this one. Dracaena draco grows very slowly and lives a very long time, so seven metres of girth means several hundred years, and that band is as tight as the evidence allows. If you have seen a figure for it, we would like the source. You walk in during business hours and nobody stops you, but it reads as a working nursery rather than a garden to visit, which is worth knowing before you go.