Two official surveys disagree about how many trunks this tree has. The regional decree's sheet records three stems, of 267, 230 and 250 centimetres round. An independent field measurement made in October 2021 for Italy's citizen tree register found a single trunk of 5.20 metres and noted specifically that it is not multi-stemmed. Nobody has been back to settle it, and the height is unsettled too, at 25 metres by one reading and 28 by the other. What is not in doubt is what it is doing here. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began this garden in 1856 on a limestone headland with almost no soil on it, had earth carted in, and filled it with conifers from California, Mexico, the Himalaya and Lebanon. The holm oak is the other kind of tree at Miramare: an evergreen broadleaf of the Mediterranean coast, small dark leaves held hard through the winter, no season in which it drops them. It is one of twelve protected trees standing within three hundred metres of each other. Its age is given as about 145 years, calculated from a registered planting year rather than from the wood, so take a decade either side. Maximilian sailed for Mexico to be crowned emperor and was shot by a firing squad in 1867. The park went on being planted without him, and this oak is part of what came after.
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Getting there
Parco del Castello di Miramare, Viale Miramare, 34151 Trieste
You can recognise it by the trunk, about 5.2 metres round, and by small dark leaves it keeps all winter. It stands among the twelve protected trees of Miramare park; the park has other holm oaks, so the girth is what tells it apart.
Free, the park is open daily. Only the castle charges admission (same as tri_001-004)
Bus 6 from Piazza Oberdan to Grignano, about 25 min, then a short walk into the park
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
- In the official register: Elenco degli alberi monumentali d'Italia (MASAF), no. 02/L424/TS/06
- masaf.gov.it
- decreti.regione.fvg.it
- ilregistrodeglialberi.it