The London Plane of Villa Tasca

Italy has exactly one nationally registered monumental plane tree in Sicily, and it stands in the private grounds of Villa Tasca on the ring road toward Monreale, not in the historic centre most visitors see. The trunk is four metres sixty-five around, thirty metres tall, and a foundation that tracks Italy's giant trees puts its age at around two centuries, without publishing how they arrived at the number, so treat that as their estimate rather than a measured fact. The tree stands 184 metres from Villa Tasca's other headline specimen, the sprawling Moreton Bay fig that shades half the garden's swan lake, on the far side of the water. Where the fig grows outward into a colonnade of secondary trunks that makes its true size a matter of definition, this plane keeps to one recognisable trunk and crown, plain columnar bulk rather than a spreading thicket. London planes are hybrids, first bred in seventeenth century Europe by crossing an American species with an Oriental one, and they became the default street tree of nineteenth century cities because almost nothing kills them, not compacted soil, not pollution, not routine pruning. What makes this one worth the ticket price is rarer: on a whole island covered in ornamental gardens built by the same wealthy families who imported half the trees on this list, nobody registered a second one.