For years, gardeners in Porta Venezia's park called this tree a metasequoia and had the genus wrong before anyone checked properly.
Bald Cypress
Bald cypress grows with its feet in standing water in Louisiana and Florida, pushing woody knees up out of the mud around its trunk. This page maps every bald cypress on the site, 16 so far across 15 cities.
Every one mapped here stands on dry European ground. Nineteenth century gardeners wanted the shape and took the swamp tree without the swamp, and it obliged: the pair behind a wall in Bergamo have been there more than two centuries, and the one in the Charlottenburg palace garden in Berlin about the same. Seville built its monument to the Romantic poet Becquer around a bald cypress that had been growing on the spot first and had nothing to do with him. Milan's was filed under the wrong genus for years, called a metasequoia by the gardeners looking after it, until somebody checked properly. Seven trees, seven cities, and no city has two.
Milan
Madrid
Photo: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Several bald cypresses grow directly out of the pond in front of the Palacio de Cristal, their trunks and lower roots permanently submerged, a planting scheme that only works because this particula...
Seville
Photo: CarlosVdeHabsburgo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Seville built a monument to its most famous Romantic poet around a tree that had nothing to do with him.
This bald cypress runs 35.7 metres tall, the tallest deciduous conifer in Seville's own survey of its singular trees, with a crown spreading 23.3 metres over the Isla de los Patos, the duck island...
Dublin
A tree built for Louisiana swampland grows in a Dublin botanic garden, and it still remembers where it came from.
The Hague
This bald cypress grows on a lawn in the garden behind Paleis Noordeinde, the working palace where the King of the Netherlands keeps his office, on ground first laid out as a private garden in the...
Geneva
Geneva's own lakeside walking guide files this tree under arbres insolites, unusual trees, and it earns the label every November by doing what no conifer is supposed to do.
Berlin
Photo: Fridolin freudenfett (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A swamp tree from the American South has spent two centuries in a Prussian palace garden.
Lyon
This tree grows as though it remembers the Louisiana wetlands its species comes from, even landlocked in a Lyon park more than eight thousand kilometres away.
Haarlem
Six bald cypresses grow together on the lowest, wettest ground in Kenaupark, and that placement is not an accident.
Lucca
Two bald cypresses stand fifteen metres apart at the pond in Lucca's botanical garden, buttressed at the base and throwing up the woody knees that let the species breathe in waterlogged ground, a t...
Leipzig
Photo: Edlerin (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A bald cypress on a Leipzig pavement is a long way from home.
Bilbao
A tree from the swamps of the American south stands at the front door of a Basque university, looking across the river at the Guggenheim.
Assen
This one is included for what it might become rather than what it is.
Austin
Father Antonio Olivares, the Franciscan who later founded San Antonio, wrote about this cypress in 1716.
Bergamo
These two are American swamp trees, and they have been standing in a walled Bergamo garden for more than two centuries.
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