The man who planted this tree was shot by a firing squad in Mexico eleven years later.
Ancient Trees in the Miramare park
Trieste, Italy
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. Twelve of the trees we map grow here. A third of them are Californian: two coast redwoods over four metres round, a Monterey cypress of the same girth, and a ghost pine whose needles sit so thinly on the branch that you can see the sky through its crown. Six Aleppo pines, all individually registered as monumental, share the grounds with a holm oak whose 5.2 metre trunk two official surveys cannot agree is one stem or three. The park is free and open daily. Only the castle charges admission.
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.
Miramare has two protected coast redwoods, and this is the one that loses the argument.
The biggest of Miramare's six protected Aleppo pines is also the one nobody has put a date on.
Fifteen metres from the largest Aleppo pine at Miramare stands the second largest, and the gap between them is 34 centimetres of girth and five metres of height.
This pine is thicker than three of its protected neighbours and lower than all but one of them.
The slimmest of Miramare's five big Aleppo pines is as tall as the fattest.
The smallest tree in Miramare's protected pine grove is barely a third of the height of the park's redwoods.
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.
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