The Chir Pine of Villa Fiorelli

Rome's monumental register lists exactly two Himalayan pines in the whole city. One stands on the Colle Oppio above the Colosseum. This is the other, a couple of kilometres east in a neighbourhood park of nine thousand square metres, with a trunk 2.97 metres round and eighteen metres above it. Pinus roxburghii grows wild on the dry outer ranges of the Himalaya, from Kashmir across to Bhutan, where it is tapped for resin the way other trees are tapped for rubber. The needles come in threes and run to thirty centimetres, long enough that the crown hangs rather than bristles, and the cones are woody, hand sized things. The ground under it stopped being farmland in July 1930, when Rome's Governorate bought the last of the Fiorelli family's land on the exclusive condition that it be used as a public park. The old manor house came down that September. Raffaele De Vico laid out the garden that replaced it in 1931, and the Tuscolano quarter's blocks of flats went up around the edge. Two gaps worth stating. Italy's register has no age field, so nobody has dated this pine. And the city's own account of what grows in the park names walnuts, carobs, plums, a ginkgo and silk trees, without mentioning a pine at all.