The Norfolk Island Pine of Villa Tasca

Thirty-five metres from Villa Tasca's Cook pine stands a second, easily confused conifer: a Norfolk Island pine, four metres eighty around, growing in the same lakeside garden. Both belong to the genus Araucaria and both come from small Pacific islands charted by the same eighteenth century voyage, but they hold their branches differently. The Norfolk pine keeps a symmetrical, tiered crown, layer stacked evenly on layer, while its neighbour grows in a narrower, leaning column. Once you know to look, the two are easy to tell apart from any distance. It shares its garden with a menagerie of large ornamental cycads and the two other headline trees already on this page, the sprawling fig and the Cook pine, part of a Romantic era garden expanded through the second half of the nineteenth century by the Tasca family. No age has been published for this individual and none is claimed here. Norfolk Island pines are a familiar houseplant everywhere in miniature, sold small and potted as an indoor Christmas tree substitute. Almost nobody who buys one sees what it becomes given an actual island climate and a century or two of room to grow: a genuine forest giant, capable of passing sixty metres in the wild, though nothing like that height here.