Thirty metres is a good height for a tree in Rome and a failure for this species.
Coast Redwood
The tallest tree species on earth takes a serious share of its water straight out of sea mist, which is the problem with growing it away from the northern Californian fog belt. This page maps every coast redwood on the site, 13 so far across 12 cities.
Europe hands it the rainless summer and none of the fog. So the redwood on Rome's Pincio has stopped at thirty metres, a good height for a Roman tree and a failure for a species that passes 110 at home, and has gone thick instead, 4.2 metres around. Where the air stays damp the answer is different: the pair at Bucaco reach forty-five metres, and Lucca's clears every tower inside the walls except the two you can climb. Most went in within a couple of decades of each other, because seed reached Europe in the 1840s and every garden with ambition wanted one. Twelve are mapped, and no two of them share a city.
Rome
Bath
The Great Dell is a disused stone quarry on the northern edge of Royal Victoria Park's Botanical Gardens, planted out in the Victorian era with conifers that had only just started arriving in Brita...
Bologna
Photo: Aneta Malinowska (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A coast redwood is a genuine oddity in an Italian city garden, and this one has grown into one of the tallest living things in Bologna: 37.4 metres, a trunk 520cm around, standing near the artifici...
Porto
Photo: duarte (CC BY)
The tallest tree species on Earth has a foothold in a four-hectare university garden in Porto, and it's already one of the biggest specimens the city has.
Trieste
The man who planted this tree was shot by a firing squad in Mexico eleven years later.
Cork
In its native range along the California and Oregon coast, Sequoia sempervirens is the tallest tree species on earth, and specimens there run past a hundred metres and two thousand years old.
Caserta
Redwoods do not usually reach four and a half metres of trunk this fast.
Lucca
Photo: Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The tallest living thing inside Lucca's walls is Californian.
Genoa
A Californian redwood 38 and a half metres tall grows in a valley north of Genoa, and it is not even the tallest tree in its own park.
Granada
Coast redwoods reached Europe in 1843, and Granada planted some of the continent's first within little more than a decade, sequoias going into the Generalife's Upper Gardens between 1854 and 1856,...
Bucaco
Bucaco's third redwood stop stands on a slope above what locals reckon the best spring water in the whole forest, the Fonte de Santa Teresa, named for the sixteenth century Carmelite reformer Teres...
Bucaco's second redwood stands 70 metres from the Porta das Lapas, the forest's western gate, on the path down to the Lago Grande where the walled forest's own cork oak already grows.
Bordeaux
Two coast redwoods stand about ten metres apart in a small garden on Bordeaux's right bank, one measuring 393 centimetres around and the other 390.
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