The Magnolia of Giorgio Santi

Pisa's two oldest living trees went into the ground the same year, planted by the same man, in the same corner of the garden. This is the other one. Giorgio Santi, then director of the university's botanical garden, set a ginkgo and this southern magnolia into the Orto del Cedro in 1787, and both are still standing. The magnolia is now around 14 metres tall. That is a long way from the coastal woods of the American southeast, where the species comes from, and a good result for a tree that spent its first decades as an expensive curiosity. There is no bare season to catch it in: the leaves are dark, glossy and evergreen, rust-coloured and felted underneath, and in early summer the flowers open cream-white and heavy, big enough to fill two hands. Nobody has taped the trunk, or nobody has published the number, so we cannot tell you how thick it is. If you have measured it, tell us. What it has watched from that spot is a working university: Napoleon's reorganisation of Tuscany, the making of a unified Italy, students collecting specimens in the 1840s and students doing the same thing this morning. Santi died in 1822. His magnolia has outlived him by two centuries and is still flowering every June.