Goethe walked through this garden in 1786, stopped at a palm, and left with the beginnings of a theory.
Photo: Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Ancient Trees in the Orto Botanico di Padova
Padua, Italy
The University of Padua founded this garden in 1545 to teach medical students which plants their patients were actually being given, the first botanical garden anywhere attached to a university and the model every later one copied.
UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1997, citing its continuous four-and-a-half centuries of scientific use rather than its age alone. Seven of the trees we map grow inside its circular walls, among them a dwarf palm Goethe wrote about, a ginkgo grafted to bear both pollen and fruit from one trunk, and Italy's first Himalayan cedar. Admission is a paid ticket, and worth it.
Lightning opened this plane from the base upward and it kept going.
Photo: lejones417 (CC BY-SA)
Somebody grafted a female branch onto this male ginkgo in the middle of the 19th century, so one tree here sheds pollen in spring and drops fruit in autumn from the same trunk.
Photo: lejones417 (CC BY-SA)
This magnolia was planted in 1786, the same year Goethe came through the gate.
The species reached Europe in 1822, and six years later this specimen went into the ground here, the first Cedrus deodara cultivated anywhere in Italy.
A slim trunk for its reported age: this Japanese cedar is said to have gone into Padua's botanical garden in 1850, which would make it around 175 years old, and eighty three centimetres of girth is...
Padua's botanical garden has two ginkgos worth stopping for, and both carry the same odd trick: a female branch grafted onto a male tree, so a single trunk produces the messy, foul-smelling fruit t...
Opening times and visitor information: Orto Botanico di Padova.
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