The Seventh Plane of the Giardino Pubblico

This plane is more than a metre slimmer than the garden's runner-up and two metres taller. The regional register lists it at 4.08 metres round the trunk and thirty-three metres high, which makes it one of the tallest trees recorded in the Giardino Pubblico on a trunk that, by this garden's standards, is modest. It has spent its life reaching up past the horse chestnuts around it rather than filling out. Those figures come from the register alone. Italy's citizen tree register, which went round most of this garden's protected planes with a tape in October 2021, has no entry for this sheet, so no independent measurement of this tree has been published, and a thirty-three-metre height is exactly the kind of number that benefits from a second look. The garden it stands in was laid out from 1854 by Muzio de Tommasini, the botanist who happened also to be Trieste's podesta, and he planted the planes himself according to the city's parks service. This tree has no date of its own; its place in that planting would make it roughly 160 to 180 years old, which is a reasonable inference and not a measurement. Through those years the city changed hands, the garden gained its busts of Triestine writers, and this plane kept climbing.