The Senegal Date Palm of the Giardini Nobel

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.