This cypress has stood on the Plano de la Flor terrace since before the Royal Botanic Garden moved to its current site.
Photo: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Mediterranean Cypress
Cupressus sempervirens
The Mediterranean cypress is the most recognisable punctuation mark in landscape: a dark green exclamation point that Van Gogh painted obsessively and that Greeks, Romans and Persians planted at graves for three thousand years before him. We map 25 of them, in 18 cities.
The mourning association is practical as much as poetic, because the tree is close to immortal by garden standards, evergreen, drought-proof and content on thin stony soil, exactly the qualities you want from something meant to outlast grief. Its species name sempervirens simply means always alive. Individual cypresses in Iran are credibly claimed at four thousand years. The cypresses mapped so far stand in cemeteries, monastery courtyards and old gardens, oldest first.
Madrid
Seville
A cemetery cypress is the least surprising tree on this list and one of the healthiest: Seville's 2022 survey recorded this one's physiology, structure and plant health all as normal or clean, stan...
Venice
Francis of Assisi is said to have landed on this four-hectare island in 1220, returning from the Fifth Crusade, and a local legend claims he planted his walking staff in the ground, where it grew i...
Venice's dead live on an island of their own, and the cypresses that ring it are the first thing anyone sees crossing the lagoon toward it.
Photo: zedecoh (CC BY 2.0)
Athens
Athens's grandest 19th century cemetery reads like an open-air sculpture museum, and the cypresses planted around its edges were a public health measure before they were ever a landscaping choice.
Photo: LBM1948 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Rome
Eighteen cypresses once ringed Piazza di Siena when the arena was laid out in 1789, part of the original hedge and tree enclosure designed by architect Antonio Asprucci for what is now Rome's inter...
Sorrento
The cemetery opened in 1876, and by the account the register recorded this cypress went into the ground the same year.
Sorrento's other cemetery cypress measures 2.66 metres round.
Behind the cemetery's large chapel, at the gate on the main avenue, stands the third of Piano di Sorrento's registered cypresses: 2.70 metres round, a hand's width thicker than the smallest of the...
Florence
Boboli's most famous cypresses are the double row lining the Viottolone, the avenue that runs straight down the hill from the amphitheatre.
This cypress grows beside a staircase, on the pilgrim climb from the river up to San Miniato al Monte.
Only one trunk on Florence's register of monumental trees is thicker than this cypress, and it belongs to a Montezuma cypress.
Bologna
A cypress stands directly over the granite tomb of Giosue Carducci in the Certosa di Bologna, one of the tallest and most immediately recognisable trees within a cemetery field otherwise dominated...
Nice
This cemetery exists because the King of Sardinia decided in 1783 that burying the dead inside church chapels was a public health risk, and ordered the practice stopped across his kingdom, which th...
Photo: Tubantia (CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL)
Istanbul
Nine cypresses inside Turkey's largest cemetery carry official Monument Tree status, and the tradition that put them there is older than any single trunk still standing.
Photo: Evangelidis (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The only tree on this list that requires a ferry to reach stands on a residential street on Büyükada, the largest of Istanbul's car-free Princes' Islands.
Cagliari
The cemetery came second.
Split
The cypress on Marjan's Kolombatović walkway went into the ground in 1908, the same year the man it honors died.
Granada
Two centenarian cypresses flank what was once the entrance to a set of royal tombs, inside a garden that has spent the last five centuries as a Franciscan convent, then a hotel.
Verona
A long avenue of cypresses climbs from the Renaissance palace at the garden's entrance toward a grotto and grotesque stone mask at the far end, the single axis around which Agostino Giusti built hi...
Photo: Annika of Nine (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Cordoba
Twenty-six and a half metres tall on a crown three and a half metres wide.
Tarragona
Two cypresses in a courtyard at a Cistercian monastery, and the courtyard now belongs to the town hall.
Perugia
The park this cypress stands in used to be where people dumped things.
Five metres and forty seven centimetres round is the largest trunk in Perugia's entire national tree register, and it belongs not to one of the city's celebrated garden cedars but to a cypress on a...
San Quirico d'Orcia
A tight, dense copse of cypresses on a Tuscan hillside has become one of the most photographed sights in Italy, and almost nobody who photographs it knows its name.
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