The Monterey Cypress of Miramare

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.