The Ginkgo of Giorgio Santi

This is reckoned to be the first ginkgo ever planted in Tuscany. Giorgio Santi, director of Pisa's university botanical garden, put it in the ground in 1787, in the section still called the Orto del Cedro, and the sapling is said to have arrived from London. Watching him do it was Gaetano Savi, young at the time and later Santi's successor in the job. Two and a bit centuries on it is the largest tree in the garden, four metres around the trunk, and it still drops its fan-shaped leaves in one short yellow week every autumn. It has stood through the French occupation of Tuscany, the unification of Italy, two world wars and about eight generations of botany students, all of it a few hundred metres from the Leaning Tower. Santi planted a magnolia the same year in the same corner, and those two are the oldest trees still alive here. They are worth seeing as a pair: one an evergreen import from the American South, the other a Chinese species with no close living relatives, both chosen by the same man in the same season and both outliving him by two hundred years.