Sanremo's remarkable trees are palms more than oaks, because the Riviera hardly freezes. Three are on the national list of monumental trees: a Chilean wine palm in the Parco Marsaglia, a stand of California fan palms at the Zampillo fountain, and a Senegal date palm nearly 20 metres tall in the Giardini Nobel, opposite Villa Ormond. A short train ride west, Bordighera adds two Moreton Bay figs ten metres round and a Canary pine 40 metres tall, all within a kilometre of its station.
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Senegal Date Palm (Phoenix reclinata) · Corso Cavallotti, east Sanremo
Most palms keep to one trunk. A Senegal date palm grows a crowd of them, slender stems leaning out from one base, and the one Italy's national list of monumental trees records in the Giardini Nobel is 19.5 metres tall and 8.3 metres round at the base of its clump.
The species comes from much of Africa, from Senegal down to the Cape and across to Madagascar, and it does well here because Sanremo barely knows frost. The garden is small and public, on the seaward side of Corso Cavallotti, and it takes its name from Alfred Nobel, who spent his last years in the villa a few hundred metres further east.
Directly across the road is the park of Villa Ormond, which has Senegal palms of its own; the city's garden guide dates those to between 1974 and 1980. Nobody has published an age for this one, so we leave it empty. If you know when it went in, tell us.
Our pin is the register's point, close but not exact, so look for the palm with many trunks rather than one. It costs nothing to see.
Chilean Wine Palm (Jubaea chilensis) · Corso Imperatrice, west Sanremo
The Chilean wine palm is one of the most massive palms there is, and it grows slowly enough that a trunk like this one, 3.34 metres round on Italy's national list of monumental trees, takes a long time to build.
The Chilean wine palm comes from a small strip of central Chile, where the wild trees were felled for centuries for the sweet sap that gives the species its name. Here it stands in the Parco Marsaglia, the garden that survived the Marsaglia family's turreted villa. Giovanni Marsaglia helped build modern Sanremo in the second half of the nineteenth century; the house was wrecked in the Second World War and pulled down, and the town kept the garden. The Italian Botanical Heritage directory calls this specimen mammoth, and it sits among Brazilian queen palms, Kentia palms, a dragon tree and cycads.
The park opens off the Corso Imperatrice, the seafront avenue named after the Russian empress Maria Alexandrovna, who gave palms to line it. No one has published when this palm was planted or how old it is. If you know, tell us.
Our pin is the register's point; the palm is the stout grey column with a dense crown. It costs nothing to see.
California Fan Palm (Washingtonia filifera) · Sanremo centre
These palms are protected as a group, which Italy's national list of monumental trees does only when the stand matters as much as any one trunk. They rise around the Zampillo, the fountain on Corso Orazio Raimondo in the middle of Sanremo.
The California fan palm grows wild along desert streams in California, Arizona and northern Mexico. It reached Europe in 1871, and by 1882 it was already common in Sanremo's gardens, according to the city's own garden guide, which also records the first flowering of the species in Europe here, in 1891, in the garden of the West-End Hotel. In other words this is a town that took to the tree early.
The species is easy to tell from the date palms around it: a straight, stout trunk, and huge fan-shaped leaves edged with white threads. Left alone it keeps its dead leaves as a brown skirt under the crown. The register gives no count, no height and no planting date for these, and no one else we found has either. If you know when they were planted, tell us.
They stand in public street space in the centre of town, so seeing them costs nothing.
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · more than a century · Bordighera (day trip from Sanremo)
Bordighera calls itself the queen of palms, but its symbol is a fig. La Scibretta, as the town calls this Moreton Bay fig beside the town hall, is 11.8 metres round on Italy's national list of monumental trees, with a crown that spreads sideways far more than it climbs.
In summer the lawn under it turns into the Scibretta Arena, with open-air concerts beneath the branches. In 2017 the crown had thinned and the deputy mayor launched a rescue, calling the tree dear to the town and a draw for the dozens of people who come up every day to photograph it. Experts assessed its health and stability that November, and the dead wood came out in March 2018.
The species is from the rainforests of eastern Australia, where it often starts life high on another tree and strangles its host with its roots. Here it drops aerial roots from its limbs that thicken into extra trunks and prop up the crown. Local accounts say it has stood here for more than a century; nobody has published a planting date. Sources disagree on its size: one garden directory gives about ten metres round and eighteen tall, the register 11.8 and 14.
It stands in public space and costs nothing to see.
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · planted 1886 · Bordighera (day trip from Sanremo)
This fig has swallowed part of the garden wall and the old entrance gate of the museum it stands in front of. It is 21 metres tall, and the Clarence Bicknell Association says Bicknell himself planted it in 1886, two years before he built the museum.
Clarence Bicknell was an English clergyman who gave up his Bordighera chaplaincy, painted wild flowers, wrote the flora of the coast between Bordighera and Sanremo, and catalogued the prehistoric rock carvings of Monte Bego in the Maritime Alps. His collections are still inside: butterflies, sketchbooks, thousands of pressed plants. Bordighera in the 1880s had more British residents than Italians, and they filled it with exotic gardens.
There are two great figs here, both on Italy's national list of monumental trees, which measures them at 9.75 and 10.2 metres round. The one at the gate, roots wrapped around the stones and a small palm growing up between its buttresses, is the one people come for; the other stands in the garden beyond. A local guide calls the Bicknell trees the oldest of Bordighera's monumental three. In spring the wisteria on the museum front, listed too, is in flower.
The gate fig can be seen from the lane; the garden opens with the museum.
Canary Pine (Pinus canariensis) · Bordighera (day trip from Sanremo)
Forty metres is the height Italy's national list of monumental trees gives this Canary pine, which makes it taller than any other tree on this page by a long way, on a street corner in Bordighera.
Via Romana is the old road along the hillside above the sea, lined with the villas and gardens the British built here in the late nineteenth century, when Bordighera was a winter resort. The pine stands where Via Tumiati meets it, 3.9 metres round at the trunk on the register.
The Canary pine comes from the mountains of Tenerife, La Palma and Gran Canaria, where it is famous for surviving forest fires: thick bark shields the trunk, and it can sprout fresh shoots straight from a burnt stem. Its needles come in threes and are very long, up to about thirty centimetres, and they hang in soft tassels.
No one has published when it was planted. If you know, tell us. It sits between the Bicknell figs, a few hundred metres west, and the Scibretta, a few hundred metres east, so it is on the way. It stands in public street space and costs nothing to see.