The Mexican Blue Palm of Villa Sciarra

A palm from the canyons of Baja California sits on Rome's monumental register, and the register is blunt about why: botanical rarity. No age, no history, no famous planter. Just a Brahea armata standing twenty metres up on the Janiculum, which the state counts as reason enough on its own. It is a desert plant. In Mexico it grows in dry rocky ravines behind the Pacific coast, and its fronds are the colour the name promises, a stiff waxy blue grey that reads as metal rather than leaf from any distance. Once a year it sends out flower spikes that arch clear of the crown and hang several metres below it, longer than the fronds they came from. Villa Sciarra reached the public through an American. George Washington Wurts bought this hillside in 1902 and spent the rest of his life filling it with whatever caught his eye, and his widow Henrietta Tower Wurts gave the whole estate to the Italian state in the early 1930s on the condition that it stay a park. Whether this palm was one of his, no document says. The register gives 2.94 metres round and twenty metres tall. Palms lay down no growth rings, so the age here is not merely undocumented, it is unknowable.