The Second Aleppo Pine of Villa Revoltella

Trieste keeps a plan for the day its biggest trees come down. Seventy-eight of them were surveyed one at a time for the risk of failure, and this pine is on that list, entered as a trunk 110 centimetres across in the park at Villa Revoltella. Convert it and you get 346 centimetres round, which is what the regional register measured here, and fourteen centimetres less than the other protected Aleppo pine standing fifty metres away. Two pines, two sets of figures. That arithmetic is the only thing proving this hillside holds a pair rather than one tree counted twice. This is the taller of them by four metres, twenty-two to the top, and the slimmer. Pinus halepensis does not grow to order: it leans, forks low and carries its needles in loose tufts at the ends of long bare limbs, so an old one reads as an open, see-through tree rather than a column, and a slope exaggerates the habit further. The register protected it on size and on the character of the stand it belongs to. What the register gave no answer to is how old it is, and neither does anything else published about this park. A dated planting record for the Revoltella grounds would settle both pines at once, and somebody in Trieste may well have one.