This yew was already a grown tree when it was carried into the garden, which makes it older than the garden.
Ancient Trees in the Giardino Inglese
Caserta, Italy
Maria Carolina of Austria wanted an English garden and got one of the first in Italy, which is why the trees here are strange.
She commissioned it in 1786 at the top of the Reggia's enormous formal park, and the English gardener John Andrew Graefer filled it with species the country had barely seen: a camphor tree from Japan, a cork oak, a Douglas fir from the American northwest, a sweet osmanthus. Seven of them are on the register today. The oldest is a yew by the Bath of Venus that was carried in fully grown, which makes it older than the garden it stands in.
Seven and three quarter metres around the trunk, and sixteen metres tall.
This tree is too small to qualify and the register listed it anyway.
This is the one tree on the walk you can put a hand on and be surprised.
Redwoods do not usually reach four and a half metres of trunk this fast.
Caserta's monumental register credits only one tree in the entire city with a wider trunk than this one, the cedar of Lebanon at the far end of the same garden.
Thirty-eight metres is a strange height for a camphor tree.
The best bow wood in North America grows in a royal garden outside Naples.
Ancient writers put this tree forward as the lotus that made Odysseus's crew forget the way home.
At forty metres, only one other tree in Caserta's register stands as tall, and this one's stated age does not quite work.
The national register credits this tree with six and a half metres of trunk.
Two trees in Caserta's monumental register share the title of tallest, and this pine is one of them: forty metres, tied with the Douglas fir a short walk away.
Caserta's monumental register now credits this garden with three London planes, and this one is the third thickest tree in the whole city register regardless of species, five metres sixty around an...
An Australian bottle tree, also called a kurrajong at home, stands thirty-five metres tall in a Bourbon queen's garden, roughly twice the height the species usually reaches.
The chir pine is tapped for resin on Himalayan foothills from Pakistan to Nepal, and one of them grows in the garden of a Bourbon palace outside Naples.
In a garden collected out of Australia, the Himalaya and California, this oak grows wild in the hills a few kilometres away.
Opening times and visitor information: the Reggia di Caserta.
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