The Twin Horse Chestnuts of the Giardino Pubblico

Two horse chestnuts stand thirty metres apart in this garden and the register measured both at exactly 335 centimetres of girth and exactly twenty-three metres of height. Identical to the centimetre, listed as two separate protected trees, and there is no way to tell from the paper which is which. They were almost certainly planted together when Muzio de Tommasini laid the garden out from 1854, and they have grown at the same rate for 170 years because nothing has happened to one that did not happen to the other. A third, slightly smaller at 317 centimetres, stands further north. Come in May. The horse chestnut is one of the few big trees that flowers in a way you notice from the other end of a park, holding hundreds of white candles upright on the ends of the branches, each one flecked with yellow that turns pink once the flower has been visited and no longer wants bees. The species itself is not from anywhere near here. It was unknown to western Europe until the sixteenth century and comes from a handful of mountain valleys in Albania and Greece, where it is now endangered in the wild.