The Ginkgo of Villa Sciarra

Rome's most famous old trees are cedars and planes, planted by cardinals and popes on grand estates. This ginkgo belongs to a very different Roman: George Washington Wurts, an American diplomat who bought this hillside property in 1902 and spent the rest of his life filling it with plants gathered from wherever caught his interest. He had the ginkgo planted in the early 1900s, one of the first established in the city, a species Europe had only known for about two centuries at that point, brought over from temple gardens in China where it had grown essentially unchanged since before the dinosaurs went extinct. Rome's own environment department now lists it among the city's roughly twenty official monumental trees, qualifying on three separate grounds at once: age and size, landscape value, and simple botanical rarity, since ginkgos remain genuinely uncommon in Roman parks even a century after Wurts planted his. The trunk has thickened to just over three metres around and the crown now reaches 25 metres, taller than most of the villa's own follies and fake ruins built around the same period. Wurts died in 1928 without seeing what came next: his widow, the American heiress Henrietta Tower Wurts, gave the whole seven and a half hectare estate to the Italian state in the early 1930s, on condition it stay a public park. Every November the tree does what ginkgos do everywhere, turning uniformly gold within days rather than fading gradually like its neighbours.