The Elm of Piazza Dante

Step off a train at Trento and the walk to a centuries-old elm takes under two minutes. The Giardino di Piazza Dante faces the station, and the comune's own description of it puts an elm and a group of yews along the north side, all of them called secolari, of the centuries. The elm is on the national monumental register. Nobody has published a precise age, so a hundred years is the floor rather than the estimate. The garden was designed in 1879 by the engineer Annibale Apollonio and was the first public garden Trento had. It has been restored in stages since 2007, and the Art Nouveau pavilion inside it now holds a children's library, which means that on a weekday afternoon the oldest tree in the square has small children reading underneath it. That is a better use of a monument than most of them get. Stand between the elm and the yews for a minute, because the pairing is instructive. The elm is a fast hardwood that can put on a metre of shoot in a good year and hollows from the inside once it stops. The yews beside it grow so slowly that they outlive almost everything planted with them. Ten metres apart, two entirely different bets on how to last. Free, open, no gate and no hours.