The Redwood of Miramare

The man who planted this tree was shot by a firing squad in Mexico eleven years later. Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began the Miramare park in the spring of 1856 on a limestone headland with almost no soil on it, and he treated the whole thing as an experiment: he wanted to find out which foreign species would hold on to bare Adriatic rock. Soil was carted in. Within ten years the garden had cedars from Lebanon, North Africa and the Himalaya, firs from Spain, cypresses from California and Mexico, and this coast redwood from the fog belt of northern California. Maximilian kept ordering plants for it after he sailed for Mexico to be crowned emperor, and he never came back. The redwood took. It is now 4.25 metres round the trunk and thirty metres tall, the largest of the two redwoods here and one of twelve protected trees standing within three hundred metres of each other. Put a hand on it. The bark is soft, dry and fibrous rather than hard, and on old trees it goes thirty centimetres deep, which is what lets a redwood walk out of a fire that kills everything around it. This one is a child by the standards of its species, which passes 115 metres at home.