The Ghost Pine of Miramare

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.