Two official registers disagree about this trunk by nearly two metres.
Himalayan Cedar
Not one of these eighteen trees grows within three thousand kilometres of the mountains it is named after. This page maps every himalayan cedar on the site, 22 so far across 16 cities.
Cedrus deodara comes from the western Himalaya, from Afghanistan through to Nepal, where deodar means timber of the gods and a tree can pass a thousand years. It reached Europe in 1822 and the continent's park builders took to it at once: Florence's specimen was on the botanical garden's books by 1880, and Bergamo's stands alone in the middle of a lawn with its own lightning conductor, because it is the tallest thing for some distance. The drooping branch tips are the field mark that separates a deodar from the stiffer cedars of Lebanon and the Atlas. Thirteen cities hold them, most of them Italian, and the two registers that measured the one in Rome disagree about its waist by nearly two metres.
Rome
Barcelona
Barcelona's tree register lists this as one protected item and 23 trees.
This cedar grows in the oldest surviving garden of its kind in Barcelona, a neoclassical estate commissioned in 1791 that later grew a romantic wing around it, cypress maze included.
Florence
The Himalayan cedar only reached Europe in 1822, and this one was on the garden's books by 1880, which makes it an early adopter of a tree that half the continent would go on to plant in every park...
Florence's public symbol has stood next to this cedar since 1865, and almost nobody visiting climbs high enough in the Boboli Gardens to notice either one.
Madrid
This cedar stands directly in front of the pond at the Palacio de Cristal, a 19th century glass and iron pavilion built in 1887 to exhibit plants and animals brought back from the Philippines, and...
Bologna
Photo: Ugeorge (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This cedar was planted by Callisto Ghigi himself when he first acquired the hillside property that still carries his family's name, and it now dominates the meadow directly in front of the villa, t...
Photo: Aneta Malinowska (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This cedar grows in the garden of a working orthopaedic hospital, on ground that has already been a monastery, a royal residence and a public park before it became a place of medicine.
Porto
Photo: Nikolau (CC BY-SA 3.0)
At around 24 metres tall, this Himalayan cedar is one of the largest of its species growing anywhere in Porto, a claim made cautiously since more than one Porto garden has a candidate for the title...
Geneva
This cedar's growth and the garden's own site are almost exactly the same age.
A second giant grows a stone's throw from the Secheron Plane, and this one is a conifer rather than a plane: a Himalayan cedar, native to the high valleys of Kashmir and Nepal, brought to Europe's...
Padua
The species reached Europe in 1822, and six years later this specimen went into the ground here, the first Cedrus deodara cultivated anywhere in Italy.
Guimaraes
Three Himalayan cedars stand at the gates of Guimaraes' municipal cemetery, tall enough that they read as a landmark from the road below rather than as cemetery planting.
Cordoba
The square was arranged around the tree.
Verona
This cedar rises over Viale Nino Bixio, a tree-lined avenue running through Borgo Trento from the city hospital toward Ponte Garibaldi, and it is one of only three trees standing anywhere within Ve...
This cedar towers over the corner of Via Volta and Via Cipolla, tall enough to be a landmark for the whole intersection long before anyone notices the Liberty-style villa it actually belongs to.
Bergamo
Photo: Luigi Chiesa (CC BY-SA 3.0)
This cedar has its own lightning conductor.
The merchants who owned this garden brought plants back from Asia, Africa and the Americas, and built a Moroccan style greenhouse in 1860 to keep the fragile ones alive.
Bordeaux
At 32 metres, this deodar is the tallest tree the Bordeaux register records in Parc de Bourran, and its crown spreads twenty metres across.
Como
Photo: Mipiacecamminare (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Italian tree register lists this one as Il Maggiore, the greater one, because there are two of them and somebody had to rank them.
Perugia
Perugia's monumental cemetery opens at seven every morning, costs nothing, and holds a Himalayan cedar with a trunk 496 centimetres round and 23.5 metres of tree above it.
Trento
This cedar was planted around the year Italy was founded, in a city that would not join it for another fifty seven years.
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