Cardinal Scipione Borghese built this park in the early 1600s as a showcase for his art collection, and his gardener planted the trees to match: oriental planes brought in as a novelty, arranged in a valley that still carries their name.
Adonis, the oldest of them, has stood here for over four centuries and outlived the villa's original owner by nearly as long. A cedar leans over the lake a few minutes' walk away, and past the boating lake stands what one conservation group calls the last survivor of the eighteen cypresses planted around Piazza di Siena in 1789, the arena that still hosts Rome's international horse show every year. Deeper into the park's holm oak wood, behind the museum that now holds a de Chirico and Warhol collection, a pair of hackberries with a four-metre girth waits on the official monumental status that roughly thirty of the park's other old trees are still queuing for.
All 5 stand in Rome, which maps 22 remarkable trees in total.
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis). Nine trees are what remain of the eleven Cardinal Scipione Borghese planted here four centuries ago.
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis). A hackberry in the holm oak wood behind the Museo Carlo Bilotti carries a nickname rather than a certificate: locals call it il bagolaro del Seicento, the hackberry of the 1600s, though nobody has run the rings to prove it.
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex). Marcantonio IV Borghese tore out six hundred holm oaks in 1784 to build an English-style garden around Villa Borghese's lake, and one tree, by luck or design, was left standing.
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens). Eighteen cypresses once ringed Piazza di Siena when the arena was laid out in 1789, part of the original hedge and tree enclosure designed by architect Antonio Asprucci for what is now Rome's international horse show.
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani). Rome's own list of monumental trees does not describe this cedar on its own.
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