The Bicknell Figs, Bordighera

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.