The Sixth Aleppo Pine of Miramare

The smallest tree in Miramare's protected pine grove is barely a third of the height of the park's redwoods. It measures 2.13 metres round the trunk and ten metres tall, well below its five siblings, which run from 3.05 to 3.68 metres round and up to twenty-five metres high. The national register gives those figures and Italy's citizen tree register confirmed them at the same spot in October 2021. It is protected because the grove is. The six Aleppo pines at Miramare are listed as one designated group, and a group listing takes the modest members with the grand ones, which is how a ten-metre pine ends up on the same national register as the largest plane in Trieste. That is not a mistake. A grove planted together reads as a grove, and this is the tree that shows how much the others have grown. When it went in is unknown. The park itself dates from 1856, when Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg began turning a bare limestone point into a garden, and the grove's one dated pine is put at about 130 years; a smaller trunk does not have to mean a younger tree, so this one gets the same broad span, somewhere between about 115 and 170 years. If you know its history, tell us.