Parma's five monumental trees cluster around one ducal park. Palazzo Ducale, the summer residence Duke Ottavio Farnese began in 1561, gives its name and its grounds to a plane tree that is now the tallest recorded in all of Emilia-Romagna, a field elm that survived the Dutch elm disease epidemic that killed most of its kind, a horse chestnut, and an oak. A short walk away in Piazzale della Pace, laid out after wartime bombing reshaped the area, a cedar of Lebanon stands as the one conifer among a remnant avenue of planes.
0 of 5 visited in Parma
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The Great Plane of Palazzo Ducale
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · over 190 years · Parco Ducale
At 47 metres this plane is the tallest tree recorded anywhere in Emilia-Romagna, taller than any specimen in a region with no shortage of old parks and avenues. Its trunk measures 6.55 metres round, thick enough that it would take four adults linking arms to circle it.
It grows a short walk from Palazzo Ducale, the summer residence Duke Ottavio Farnese began building in 1561 at the head of a park he laid out the same year. Neither the palace nor its grounds had an easy eighteenth century: during the War of the Austrian Succession in 1745, occupying troops under Prince Lobkowicz felled and burned every mature tree in the park, including those on the ornamental island at its centre, to fuel their camp fires. Duke Filippo di Borbone had the grounds replanted from 1749 under the French architect Ennemond Alexandre Petitot, and further plane trees went in around 1830 under Duchess Maria Luigia, Napoleon's second wife, who governed Parma as her own duchy after his fall.
This plane's exact planting date is not recorded, but its size puts it among the park's oldest survivors. The park holds more than 1,500 catalogued trees today and opened to the public after Italian unification, when the ducal walls came down.
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2
The Cedar of Lebanon of Piazza della Pace
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · over a century · Piazzale della Pace
Piazzale della Pace did not exist as a square until after the Second World War, laid out over ground reshaped by the bombing that damaged much of central Parma. What it holds today is an English-style lawn framed by remnants of a much older avenue: four large plane trees, survivors of a row that once counted 65, and this cedar of Lebanon, the piazza's one conifer.
Protected by the city since the 1950s, the cedar was formally added to Italy's National List of Monumental Trees and the regional list only recently, alongside the square's plane trees. Its girth of over four metres marks it as a substantial, century-old specimen even before the paperwork caught up with what Parma's gardeners already knew. Tree climbers and arborists check it regularly now, work that has included tomography scans of the trunk and root aeration to keep both the tree and the pedestrians beneath it safe.
Cedrus libani is native to the mountains of Lebanon, Syria and Turkey and was one of the first conifers European gardeners collected purely for its shape and scale rather than for timber. In a square defined by its open lawn, this is the one thing in it with a genuinely different silhouette.
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3
The Field Elm of Parco Ducale
Field Elm (Ulmus minor) · roughly 90 years · Parco Ducale
Dutch elm disease reached Italy in the 1930s and took most of the country's mature field elms with it over the following two decades, the same epidemic that emptied European streets and parks of the species almost everywhere else. This elm, growing near the Palazzetto Sanvitale inside Parco Ducale, is one of the few in the area that made it through.
At 3.82 metres round and 37.5 metres tall it has grown taller than the horse chestnuts and planes usually associated with the park's grand avenues, a field elm doing what the species can do when disease does not cut it short first. Ulmus minor naturally reaches a broad, high canopy on a single strong trunk, and this one has had the decades to prove it, in a park that lost every mature tree it had once already, burned for firewood by occupying troops in 1745.
The elm is deliberately not the story's dramatic tree here. It survived nothing spectacular in the way a fire or a storm is spectacular; it simply kept growing while a fungus carried by bark beetles worked through nearly everything nearby that shared its genus.
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4
The Horse Chestnut of Parco Ducale
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · over a century · Parco Ducale
Horse chestnuts are, by the park's own count, one of its three most common old species alongside plane and lime, and this one earned an individual place on Italy's monumental register on its own measurements: 3.70 metres round the trunk. It is a broad, low-crowned tree rather than a tall one, 16 metres against the 47 of the park's tallest plane, which is exactly the shape Aesculus hippocastanum tends toward once it has had a century to fill out.
Parco Ducale's chestnuts are old enough that the park's own literature describes bicentenary specimens among them, planted in the waves of restoration that followed the destruction of 1745 and the redesign under Duke Filippo di Borbone from 1749. Spring here means candle-shaped white flower spikes across the park's oldest chestnuts, and by autumn the same trees are dropping conkers onto the paths beneath them, a seasonal cycle Parma's gardeners have watched repeat for two centuries.
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5
The Pedunculate Oak of Palazzo Ducale
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · over a century · Parco Ducale
This oak, 4.20 metres round and 25 metres tall, stands at the western edge of the grounds around Palazzo Ducale, the summer palace Duke Ottavio Farnese began in 1561 and the building that gives the whole park its name. Farnea, the local name the register uses for Quercus robur, is not one of the species most associated with this park; horse chestnuts, planes and limes dominate the planting record, which makes an oak this size a genuine outlier rather than one of a matching set.
Whatever stood on this ground before 1745 is not recorded individually, because the whole park lost its mature trees that year: troops occupying Parma during the War of the Austrian Succession cut and burned every one of them, including those on the park's central ornamental island, to feed their fires. Everything growing in Parco Ducale today, this oak included, is therefore at most a product of the 1749 restoration under Duke Filippo di Borbone and the French architect Petitot, or of the further planting waves that followed through the nineteenth century.
Pedunculate oaks live for centuries when left alone, far longer than this one has yet had, which makes it one of the park's trees with the most growing still ahead of it.
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