The Fig of the Giardino Inglese

Eight metres round the trunk and eleven metres tall: this is a fig that spent its growth going sideways. It stands in the Giardino Inglese, the long public park Giovan Battista Filippo Basile laid out from 1851 as Palermo pushed north out of its old walls along Via della Libertà, and of the several big Moreton Bay Figs growing there it is the one Sicily's register of monumental trees actually measured, at 820 centimetres of girth and 11 metres of height. The park's figs trace back to stock raised at the Orto Botanico across town, which is where most of this city's Australian giants began. Ficus macrophylla behaves the same way wherever it is comfortable: branches send roots down, the roots reach soil and thicken into trunks of their own, and a single stem slowly turns into a colonnade. The garden around it has changed names along with the century. It carries Piersanti Mattarella's name now, after the president of Sicily shot dead in Palermo in 1980, and on a warm afternoon it is full of people treating it as a park rather than a memorial. Nobody has published an age for this tree. The Italian register has no age column, and no one appears to have dated this specimen. If you have seen a figure for it, send it over and we will add it.