The man who planted this tree was shot by a firing squad in Mexico eleven years later.
Ancient Trees in the Miramare park
The man who planted these trees was shot by a firing squad in Mexico eleven years later.
Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began the Miramare park in the spring of 1856 on a limestone headland with almost no soil on it, and he ran the whole thing as an experiment: he wanted to know which foreign species would hold on to bare Adriatic rock. The soil was carted in. The answer is still standing. Six of the trees we map grow here and half of them are Californian: a coast redwood and a Monterey cypress both over four metres round, and a ghost pine whose needles sit so thinly on the branch that you can see the sky through its crown. The thickest trunk here belongs to a holm oak at 5.2 metres, and two official surveys cannot agree on whether it is one trunk or three. The park is free and open daily. Only the castle charges admission.
All 6 stand in Trieste, which maps 20 remarkable trees in total.
In the wild this species survives in two groves on the California coast, together covering less than a square kilometre, and it is listed as threatened.
Trieste calls this one il pino fantasma, the ghost pine, and the name is a description rather than a flourish.
This is a shrub that forgot to stop.
Two official surveys disagree about how many trunks this tree has.
Six Aleppo pines in this park carry the same protection, all within three hundred metres of each other, and this is not the largest of them.
Opening times and visitor information: the Miramare Castle Historical Museum.
More parks worth the walk: every park we map. Or explore by city: Brussels · Pamplona · Lisbon · Barcelona · Milan · Amsterdam