The Aleppo Pine of Miramare

Six Aleppo pines in this park carry the same protection, all within three hundred metres of each other, and this is not the largest of them. The biggest measures 3.68 metres round the trunk; this one is 3.10. It is here because it is the only one of the six that anybody has put a date to: about 130 years, calculated by Italy's citizen tree register from a recorded planting year rather than from the wood, so read it as a decade either way. That would make it a good forty years younger than the garden it stands in. Archduke Maximilian began Miramare in 1856 by carting soil onto bare limestone to find out which foreign species would hold on to Adriatic rock. The Aleppo pine needed no such help. It is the pine of the Mediterranean shoreline, at home on thin stony ground and salt air, with an open crown that lets the light through and cones that can stay shut on the branch for years, waiting for heat to open them. It is 19 metres tall, and here is the honest part: at this coordinate you will find several trunks of much the same thickness, none of them separately named or described in any register we could find. Nobody has photographed this one closely enough to tell it from its neighbours. If you work out which is which, tell us.