The Queensland Pine of Villa Trabia

A bunya pine drops cones that weigh as much as a bowling ball. Araucaria bidwillii comes from Queensland, where the fruiting season is fenced off for exactly that reason, and Palermo planted one anyway in the garden of Villa Trabia. The garden is the story around it. Between 1886 and 1903 the head gardener Vincenzo Ostinelli turned the grounds into a giardino romantico stuffed with exotics: araucarias, palms, conifers, ornamental figs. An inventory he compiled in 1910 counted 2,790 plant species in the park. Roughly 150 of them are still there. Nobody recorded which year this pine went in, so it may or may not date from that planting, and the register does not say either. What is measured is the trunk, 2.22 metres round, which for this species is a mature tree rather than an old one. The bunya's shape is the reason to look up: a straight column with the branches gathered into distinct tiers and turned up at the ends, like a candelabra that has been left out in the weather. The garden opens weekday mornings only, which is worth checking before the walk, and it tightens the loop with the trees already on this page rather than adding another distant stop.