The Cedar Above the Lake

Rome's own list of monumental trees does not describe this cedar on its own. It describes it as accompanied by a monumental holm oak, and the two really do stand 70 metres apart at the same water. That phrasing is the giveaway: this tree was never meant to be looked at as a specimen. When Marcantonio IV Borghese remade the grounds in the 1780s he was buying a painting, not a collection. His architects Antonio and Mario Asprucci dug an artificial lake, put an island in it, built a small Ionic temple to Aesculapius on the island in 1786, and planted around all of it to make the view from the bank look like a landscape that had always been there. The cedar is scenery, and it is doing the job two and a half centuries later: 4.1 metres around, 22 metres tall, a flat candelabra crown leaning out over the rowing boats. Cedrus libani was the prestige tree of that generation of Roman gardens, planted in half the noble villas on this list, but most of those sit on lawns and terraces. This one has water under it, which is why it is the one people photograph.