The Redwood of the Pincio

Thirty metres is a good height for a tree in Rome and a failure for this species. Sequoia sempervirens is the tallest living thing on earth, passing 110 metres in the fog belt of northern California, and it gets there by drinking the fog directly through its leaves during a rainless summer. Rome offers it a rainless summer without the fog. So the redwood on the Pincio has grown thick instead of tall, 4.2 metres around, and still ends up among the five tallest trees on the city's entire monumental register, which says more about Rome's trees than about this one. It grows on Giuseppe Valadier's terrace, laid out between 1809 and 1814 during the French occupation as a public promenade above Piazza del Popolo, at a moment when Roman gardening was swinging from clipped geometry to imported curiosities. Nobody has published when it was planted or by whom. It reached the national register late, in the batch of Roman trees added after the well-documented ones, and that entry is the only document about it that exists: species, girth, height, a coordinate. Everything else anyone tells you about this tree is a guess, including the ones that sound confident.