The Second Redwood of Miramare

Miramare has two protected coast redwoods, and this is the one that loses the argument. It measures 4.01 metres round and twenty-seven metres tall; its neighbour sixty-odd metres to the northeast, the park's headline redwood, is 4.25 metres round and thirty metres tall. Both were measured again in October 2021 by Italy's citizen tree register, which found this trunk at exactly the figure the national register gives. They are here because of one experiment. When Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began the park in the spring of 1856 on a bare limestone headland, he wanted to see which foreign trees would take to the Adriatic, and within its first decade the planting included conifers from the fog belt of northern California. Nobody dated this trunk individually, so its age of roughly 170 years is an inference from that campaign rather than a measurement, and it may be a little younger. What it has outlived is the man. Maximilian left Miramare to become Emperor of Mexico and was shot there in 1867, while redwoods that can live for two thousand years were barely taller than the castle's gardeners. Stand between the two redwoods and compare the bark: soft, fibrous and red-brown on both, but this is the slimmer trunk and the lower crown.