Adonis

Nine trees are what remain of the eleven Cardinal Scipione Borghese planted here four centuries ago. Adonis is the largest survivor: a vast, hollow-trunked oriental plane at the entrance to what is now called the Valley of the Plane Trees, planted in the early 1600s by the cardinal's gardener, Domenico Savini da Montepulciano. At around 425 years old, it and its siblings are described by Italian foresters as the only urban stand of ancient oriental planes left in the West, and the oldest living trees in Rome. In 2021 the garden cloned it, growing a sapling from a single leaf found sprouting on the fragile trunk. The clone, planted nearby as Adonis Junior, is genetically identical to a four-hundred-year-old tree despite being six years old at planting. It was a hedge against the inevitable: Adonis is hollow and propped, and a nearby oak from the same era, nicknamed the Quercia del Lupo for a wolf-shaped burl on its trunk and already documented in a memoir of the villa's gardens by the 1650s, collapsed in a storm in 2018 after three to five hundred years standing, accounts differ. Adonis is still leafing out every spring in the hunting park a cardinal built long before anyone thought to call it a public garden.