What is the oldest tree in Pisa?
Pisa's oldest trees are a ginkgo and a southern magnolia in the university's Orto Botanico, both planted in 1787 by the garden's director, Giorgio Santi, in the section still called the Orto del Cedro. Two and a bit centuries on, the ginkgo is the largest tree in the garden at four metres round; the magnolia has never been measured. They stand a few steps apart.
Giorgio Santi directed Pisa's university botanical garden in the late 1700s and planted a ginkgo and a southern magnolia in the same corner in 1787, reportedly watched by Gaetano Savi, then young and later his own successor in the post. The ginkgo, said to be the first ever planted in Tuscany, has grown into the garden's largest tree, four metres around the trunk, and still turns gold and drops its leaves inside a single week each November. The magnolia has reached about 14 metres and flowers every June, though nobody has published a girth for it. Two more trees from the following decades share the garden's arboretum beds: a plane from 1808 whose exact species is disputed between two independent sources, and a live oak from Virginia planted in 1829, both surviving a late-1800s reorganisation of the grounds that moved everything younger or smaller than they already were. The garden itself, founded in 1544, is the oldest university botanical garden anywhere still on its original site, and all four trees have grown up inside that continuous institution rather than a park that changed hands.
One of Pisa's trees also appears in Autumn Worth the Trip, a themed collection spanning several cities.