The Dragon Tree of Vivai Lo Porto
several hundred yearsDragon Tree
Which one is it? The biggest dragon tree on the nursery grounds, seven metres round. Two smaller ones are elsewhere in the city, on this same page.
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.
The button above opens directions in your maps app. Corso Calatafimi, southwest Palermo, roughly 2.3km from the city-centre cluster (Villa Trabia/Villa Malfitano); its own small cluster with the register's Sterculia acerifolia 'Albero del fuoco' (girth 450cm) about 65m away, a candidate not researched
- Species
- Dragon Tree (Dracaena draco)
- Age estimate
- several hundred years
- Location
- Vivai Lo Porto, Corso Calatafimi 262, Palermo (Calatafimi)
- Access
- Vivai Lo Porto is a working plant nursery and garden centre, not a park: open to anyone who walks in during business hours (Mon-Sat 7:30-18:00, Sun 7:30-13:30 per public listings), no ticket or purchase required to view the grounds. It is genuinely public-facing (a nursery counter, not a gate to ask through) but the honest caveat for the page is that it reads as a business, not a garden attraction.
- Getting there
- Corso Calatafimi, southwest Palermo, roughly 2.3km from the city-centre cluster (Villa Trabia/Villa Malfitano); its own small cluster with the register's Sterculia acerifolia 'Albero del fuoco' (girth 450cm) about 65m away, a candidate not researched
Trees nearby
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
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