The Fourth Aleppo Pine of Miramare

This pine is thicker than three of its protected neighbours and lower than all but one of them. The trunk measures 3.24 metres round; the crown stops at sixteen metres, where a slimmer pine in the same grove reaches twenty-five. The national register gives both figures and Italy's citizen tree register checked them on the ground in October 2021 and found the same numbers at the same point. Neither register says why it grew wide rather than tall, and it is not our place to guess. It is one of six Aleppo pines at Miramare protected together, all within a few hundred metres, all planted into the park that Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began carving out of a bare limestone headland in 1856. Soil had to be brought in before anything could grow here. Aleppo pine, named after the Syrian city and native to the dry Mediterranean coast, was one of the trees that needed the least of it. No record dates this trunk; by its dated sibling, about 130 years old, and the park's own start, it falls somewhere between about 115 and 170 years. It stands at the northern end of the grove with the smallest of the six a few paces away, which makes it the easier of that pair to pick out: the thicker one.