The Third Plane of the Giardino Pubblico

Two of the thickest trees in Trieste stand about twenty metres apart in this garden, and this is the smaller by five centimetres. It measures 5.20 metres round the trunk and twenty-eight metres tall. Its neighbour to the northeast is 5.25 metres; the great plane beyond both is 5.42. At that size five centimetres is a rounding error, and Italy's citizen tree register, which checked both in October 2021, found the national register's numbers held for each. The man responsible was an unusual kind of mayor. Muzio de Tommasini ran Trieste as its podesta and spent the rest of his time as a working botanist, and when the city opened this public garden in 1854 on land bought from Benedictine nuns, he planted its plane avenue himself, according to the municipality's own account. No record dates this particular tree, but a trunk this size in that avenue is most likely one of his, which would put it at roughly 160 to 180 years. Those years have covered the whole modern history of the city: a Habsburg free port, the First World War, a change of flag after 1918 and another fight over its border after 1945. The plane has simply got wider through all of it, one annual ring at a time.