The Podocarp of Villa Sciarra

Most trees earn a place on Italy's monumental register for being old or enormous. This one is on it for being strange. The Lazio survey gives its reason as a single letter, d, botanical rarity, and lists no other qualifying criterion at all: not age, not size, not landscape value. At two metres around and 18 metres tall it is a decent tree in a city full of far bigger ones, and the state protects it anyway, because there is essentially nothing else like it growing in Rome. Podocarps are a mostly southern conifer family that split off long before pines existed and never adopted the cone. Instead the seed sits on a swollen fleshy stalk that turns purple and gets eaten by birds, which is why Podocarpus neriifolius spread from the Himalayan foothills to New Guinea and why Buddhist communities planted it around temples across that whole range. Rome's own city government calls this specimen splendid and enormous. It stands on Viale Adolfo Leducq roughly 20 metres from the ginkgo, both of them bought by the same American collector in the same decade, which makes this stretch of path the most botanically improbable 50 metres in the city.