The Himalayan Cedar of the German Institute

Two official registers disagree about this trunk by nearly two metres. Italy's national list gives it as five metres around; the Lazio regional list, which is where the national one gets its Roman entries in the first place, says 3.3. Both are describing the same deodar standing beside the villa's main house, and neither has ever put a date on it. What the regional list does say is unusual: of the 65 monumental trees inside the comune of Roma, this is one of only three designated partly for architettura vegetale, vegetal architecture, the surveyor's term for a tree whose shape is itself the built object. Not its age. Not its girth. Its form. Cedrus deodara grows wild at 1,500 to 3,000 metres in the western Himalaya, where its Sanskrit name means timber of the gods and its wood built temples. This one arrived by way of a rich American's shopping habit. George Washington Wurts bought the hillside in 1902 and spent 26 years filling it with plants from wherever caught his attention, the ginkgo 130 metres downhill among them. The house behind the cedar became the Italian Institute of German Studies in 1931, three years after Wurts died, and the tree has been institutional property ever since.