The Pecan of the Orto Botanico

The vine wound around this trunk is a houseplant. Monstera deliciosa is the thing sold in pots at knee height across northern Europe, and in the Orto Botanico it has been left to do what it does in the wild, climbing a pecan the way ivy climbs a wall. The tree underneath is worth the look on its own. Thirty metres tall and 5.6 metres round, it is one of the giants in a garden full of them, and it belongs on another continent entirely. Carya illinoinensis is the pecan of the American South, a river-bottom hickory from the Mississippi basin, and it has put on full American height in a walled garden a few streets from the Sicilian coast. That is the point of the place. Palermo's botanical garden has spent two centuries working out which foreign species will take to this heat and this soil, and the answer here was emphatic. It is easy to walk past, which is the usual fate of a tall straight tree standing among Australian figs that grow sideways and drop columns from their branches. Look up instead, and then look at what is climbing it. Nobody has published an age for it. The Italian register carries girth and height and has no age column at all, and the local writing about the garden's giants describes this tree without dating it. If you know when it went in, tell us and it goes on the page.