What is the oldest tree in Trieste?

The London plane at the Boschetto roundabout on Viale al Cacciatore, which the city puts at over 200 years. It is older than the Giardino Pubblico and older than the Miramare park, both of which were planted in the 1850s.

Can you walk between them?

In two walks, not one. Four stand inside three hundred metres of each other in the Miramare park, eight kilometres up the coast. The other four are in the city, spread along about a kilometre from the Giardino Pubblico up Via Giulia to the Boschetto roundabout.

Do they cost anything to see?

No. The Miramare park is free and open daily, and the castle inside it is the only part you pay for. The Giardino Pubblico is a free public park and the Boschetto plane stands on a public street.

Why are there Californian trees at Miramare?

Because Maximilian treated the park as an experiment. He wanted to know which foreign species would survive on bare Adriatic limestone, and within ten years the garden had cedars from Lebanon, North Africa and the Himalaya, cypresses from California and Mexico, and the redwoods that are still the tallest things in it.

Italy

Ancient Trees in Trieste

Trieste holds the densest cluster of registered monumental trees in Italy, and it comes in two halves. Twelve protected trees stand inside three hundred metres of each other in the park an Austrian archduke laid out on a limestone headland in 1856, planting Californian conifers on the Adriatic because he wanted to see whether they would take. The other half grows in the city, in a public garden a botanist mayor planted himself and along the road climbing out of it. Eight of them are here, in two walks.

The Redwood of Miramare

Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · about 170 years, planted after 1856 · Grignano

The man who planted this tree was shot by a firing squad in Mexico eleven years later. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began the Miramare park in the spring of 1856 on a limestone headland with almost no soil on it, and he treated the whole thing as an experiment: he wanted to find out which foreign species would hold on to bare Adriatic rock. Soil was carted in. Within ten years the garden had cedars from Lebanon, North Africa and the Himalaya, firs from Spain, cypresses from California and Mexico, and this coast redwood from the fog belt of northern California. Maximilian kept ordering plants for it after he sailed for Mexico to be crowned emperor, and he never came back. The redwood took. It is now 4.25 metres round the trunk and thirty metres tall, the largest of the two redwoods here and one of twelve protected trees standing within three hundred metres of each other. Put a hand on it. The bark is soft, dry and fibrous rather than hard, and on old trees it goes thirty centimetres deep, which is what lets a redwood walk out of a fire that kills everything around it. This one is a child by the standards of its species, which passes 115 metres at home.

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The Monterey Cypress of Miramare

Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) · about 170 years, planted after 1856 · Grignano

In the wild this species survives in two groves on the California coast, together covering less than a square kilometre, and it is listed as threatened. Planted anywhere else with sea air, it grows into one of the fastest and heaviest conifers a garden can hold. That is the paradox of the Monterey cypress, and this is what it looks like when it goes well: 4.1 metres round the trunk, eighteen metres tall, and far wider than it is high, because an old Monterey cypress stops climbing and starts spreading until the crown flattens out like a table. Maximilian's gardeners put it in after 1856 among the cypresses ordered from California and Mexico, and on a headland that gets the bora full in the face it has done the thing the archduke was testing for. The wind has pushed the whole crown away from the sea, so the tree leans its weight inland and reads as a permanent record of the direction the worst weather comes from. Crush a leaf between your fingers and it smells of lemon. The Italian sources describing the park call this simply the cypress, and one of them names the wrong species for it, so trust the trunk rather than the label.

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The Ghost Pine of Miramare

Ghost Pine (Pinus sabiniana) · about 170 years, planted after 1856 · Grignano

Trieste calls this one il pino fantasma, the ghost pine, and the name is a description rather than a flourish. Its needles are long, grey and set so thinly on the branch that you can see straight through the crown to the sky behind it, which no other pine in the park lets you do. Stand under it on a bright day and the tree casts almost no shadow. It comes from the dry foothills that ring California's Central Valley, where it grows on serpentine and rubble that defeats everything else, and it was one of the more eccentric things Maximilian's gardeners were given to try. Italy's register protects it on grounds of botanical rarity, a category only two trees in the whole Trieste list are given. The cones are the other reason to come. A ghost pine cone is the size of a human head, weighs up to a kilogram, and hangs on hooked scales that will draw blood if you grab one wrongly; the people who lived in its native range ate the seeds, which are large and oily and worth the trouble. At 2.5 metres round and twenty metres tall it is not the biggest tree here, and it is the strangest.

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The Greek Strawberry Tree of Miramare

Greek Strawberry Tree (Arbutus andrachne) · about 170 years, planted after 1856 · Grignano

This is a shrub that forgot to stop. Arbutus andrachne normally tops out as a thick bush on a Greek or Turkish hillside, and the Italian register lists this one at 2.04 metres round the trunk and twelve metres tall, which for the species is close to absurd. It is the reason the tree is protected on botanical rarity as well as on size. The bark is the thing to look at. Each summer the outer layer peels away in thin sheets like sunburn, and what is left underneath is a bare trunk the colour of cinnamon, cool and slightly waxy to touch, with no fissures anywhere on it. Run a hand along it and the surface feels closer to skin than to timber. Maximilian's gardeners planted it after 1856 among the Mediterranean species that were meant to prove the headland could hold a garden, and unlike the common strawberry tree it was never a safe bet this far north. Fifty-nine of its common cousins, Arbutus unedo, grow a couple of hundred metres away as a registered stand, and none of them has done what this one did. Its flowers come as small white bells in spring, its fruit as round orange berries.

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The Great Plane of the Giardino Pubblico

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 180 years · Barriera Vecchia

The city dug up the pavement around this tree and threw it away. The Giardino Pubblico's biggest plane is 542 centimetres round the trunk and thirty-four metres tall, the largest tree in Trieste by measurement, and the paving laid over its root plate was slowly suffocating it, so the municipality broke the surface out and replaced it with draining material. That is what caring for a 180 year old tree in a city actually looks like. The garden around it was begun in 1854 by Muzio de Tommasini, a serious botanist who happened also to be the podesta of Trieste, on ground bought from Benedictine nuns after a plan to build a church and housing there was dropped. He planted the planes himself. Three hectares now hold roughly 320 large trees from five continents, arranged along paths lined with the bronze heads of Triestine writers, and Italo Svevo walked here often enough that the garden turns up in what he wrote. Nine planes in this garden are on Italy's monumental register and this is the heaviest of them. Stand back far enough to take in the whole trunk: the bark flakes off in plates and leaves the pale patchwork that is the only thing about a London plane you can identify from a hundred metres.

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The Twin Horse Chestnuts of the Giardino Pubblico

Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · about 170 years, planted with the garden from 1854 · Barriera Vecchia

Two horse chestnuts stand thirty metres apart in this garden and the register measured both at exactly 335 centimetres of girth and exactly twenty-three metres of height. Identical to the centimetre, listed as two separate protected trees, and there is no way to tell from the paper which is which. They were almost certainly planted together when Muzio de Tommasini laid the garden out from 1854, and they have grown at the same rate for 170 years because nothing has happened to one that did not happen to the other. A third, slightly smaller at 317 centimetres, stands further north. Come in May. The horse chestnut is one of the few big trees that flowers in a way you notice from the other end of a park, holding hundreds of white candles upright on the ends of the branches, each one flecked with yellow that turns pink once the flower has been visited and no longer wants bees. The species itself is not from anywhere near here. It was unknown to western Europe until the sixteenth century and comes from a handful of mountain valleys in Albania and Greece, where it is now endangered in the wild.

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The Valonia Oak of the Giardino Pubblico

Valonia Oak (Quercus ithaburensis subsp. macrolepis) · about 170 years, planted with the garden from 1854 · Barriera Vecchia

This is the only valonia oak in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and it is the only tree on Trieste's entire monumental register protected for botanical rarity and nothing else. Every other entry earns its place on size, age or the look of the thing. This one is here because there is no second example within a region of 1.2 million people. At 179 centimetres round it is also one of the smallest trees on the list, which tells you how little the measurement matters in this case. The acorns are the reason the species was ever worth anything. A valonia acorn sits in a cup covered in thick shaggy scales that curl outward like a sea anemone, and those cups are extraordinarily rich in tannin. For centuries the eastern Mediterranean shipped them west by the boatload to tan leather, and the trade was large enough that the Greek and Turkish groves were managed for it. The species is semi-evergreen, holding tired leaves through mild winters and dropping them late. It grows wild in Greece, western Turkey and one wood in Puglia. Muzio de Tommasini, a botanist before he was a mayor, would have known exactly how unusual it was to put one in the ground here.

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The Plane of the Boschetto Roundabout

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · over 200 years · Boschetto del Ferdinandeo

Trieste's oldest tree stands on a traffic roundabout. The municipality's survey of its 48 monumental trees puts this London plane above 200 years, which makes it older than every park in the city: older than the Giardino Pubblico begun in 1854 a kilometre downhill, older than the Miramare park begun in 1856, older than the Ferdinandeo villa on the slope above it. It was in the ground when Trieste was still Austria's only real seaport and the road it stands on was a country lane. It is five metres and ten centimetres round the trunk and twenty-five metres tall. The London plane was the tree of choice for the avenues and gardens Trieste built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which is why nearly a fifth of the city's protected trees are planes, and this is the survivor from the first of those plantings. A second registered plane stands twenty-five metres away, 440 centimetres round, and the two of them frame the entrance to the Boschetto del Ferdinandeo, the wooded hill that Triestini have walked up on Sunday afternoons for as long as the trees have been there. Take Via Giulia out of the public garden and keep climbing.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Trieste?: The London plane at the Boschetto roundabout on Viale al Cacciatore, which the city puts at over 200 years. It is older than the Giardino Pubblico and older than the Miramare park, both of which were planted in the 1850s.
Can you walk between them?: In two walks, not one. Four stand inside three hundred metres of each other in the Miramare park, eight kilometres up the coast. The other four are in the city, spread along about a kilometre from the Giardino Pubblico up Via Giulia to the Boschetto roundabout.
Do they cost anything to see?: No. The Miramare park is free and open daily, and the castle inside it is the only part you pay for. The Giardino Pubblico is a free public park and the Boschetto plane stands on a public street.
Why are there Californian trees at Miramare?: Because Maximilian treated the park as an experiment. He wanted to know which foreign species would survive on bare Adriatic limestone, and within ten years the garden had cedars from Lebanon, North Africa and the Himalaya, cypresses from California and Mexico, and the redwoods that are still the tallest things in it.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Trieste? The full answer, with map and directions.
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