What is the oldest tree in Turin?

Probably the plane in Parco della Tesoriera, over 200 years old and 3.6 km west of this walk. Of the eight trees here, three sit in the register's oldest band: the two Valentino planes at the Eridano and the Fontana dei Dodici Mesi, and the oak behind the Castello del Valentino.

Can you walk between them?

Yes, and it is one straight line. All eight lie within a 1.9 km spread running south from Porta Nuova station to the Po, about three kilometres of actual walking and an easy afternoon. The first tree is sixty seconds from the platform.

Do any of them cost anything?

No. All eight stand in public gardens and parks that are free and open, and the regional register lists every one of them as publicly owned. Parco del Valentino, which holds five of the eight, has no gates.

Why are so many of Turin's monumental trees plane trees?

Seven of the fourteen on the regional register are London planes, including four of the five that the register dates past 200 years. The plane took over European city planting because it tolerates compacted soil, drought and dirty air, and along the Po it also gets a water table close to the surface, which is why Turin's grow so tall.

Italy

Ancient Trees in Turin

Turin's monumental trees run in a line from the front door of the station to the river, and this walk takes eight of them in about three kilometres. It starts with a Caucasian wingnut six metres round in the garden outside Porta Nuova, passes a plane and a ginkgo in a garden built on demolished bastions, and finishes in Parco del Valentino with the tallest tree in the city, forty metres of London plane beside an 1898 fountain. Half of Turin's listed trees are planes, and the park holds most of them.

Photo: Matthewlunas, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Caucasian Wingnut of the Giardino Sambuy

Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 100 to 200 years, by the regional register's age band · Centro · at its best now

The first monumental tree on this walk is sixty seconds from the platform you arrive on. Giardino Sambuy fills the middle of Piazza Carlo Felice, directly opposite Porta Nuova station, and the heavy fluted trunk near its centre belongs to a Caucasian wingnut six metres round. The species comes from the forests of the Caucasus and northern Iran and reached European gardens in the 1780s, which is why it turns up in exactly the sort of nineteenth century civic planting this garden is. The garden carries the name of Ernesto Balbo Bertone di Sambuy, who ran Turin's public gardens before becoming its mayor, and who laid out the Giardini Cavour at the next stop. The first two stops on this walk are in that sense the same man's work. Come in July or August. A wingnut in fruit hangs its seeds in chains up to half a metre long, green ropes of small winged nutlets that dangle straight down through the canopy and make the tree unmistakable from across the square. The register measures it at twenty-seven metres and puts it between one hundred and two hundred years old. It is the widest trunk the register records anywhere near the city centre.

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The Plane of the Giardini Cavour

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 150 years, from the garden's laying out in the 1870s · Centro

This garden is built on the rubble of Turin's defences, and the humps you walk over are the evidence. When the seventeenth century fortifications came down the ground was left uneven, and between 1872 and 1875 Ernesto Balbo Bertone di Sambuy turned that awkward topography into an English style garden of irregular mounds and curved beds, planting large trees straight into it: planes, limes, oaks, horse chestnuts, magnolias. This plane is the one that did best. It stands thirty-four metres tall with a crown thirty metres across, so it covers most of the garden on its own, and it is five and a half metres round the trunk. Platanus x acerifolia is a hybrid of the oriental and the American plane that turned up in seventeenth century Europe by accident and then became the standard city tree everywhere, because it puts up with compacted soil, drought and filthy air, and sheds its bark in plates to shed the dirt along with it. Turin took to it harder than most Italian cities: half the trees on the regional monumental register for the comune are planes. Look for the flaking camouflage bark and the fruit balls that hang on stalks all winter.

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Photo: Matthewlunas, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Ginkgo of the Giardini Cavour

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · about 150 years, from the garden's laying out in the 1870s · Centro

Sixty metres from the plane stands a tree with no living relatives. Ginkgo biloba is the only surviving species of an entire order of plants, closer to the conifers than to anything else with a broad leaf, and near identical leaves come out of rock two hundred million years old. This one is twenty-seven metres tall and three metres seventy round, planted with the rest of the garden in the 1870s. The register lists it for its particular vegetative architecture rather than its size, and standing under it shows why: the trunk goes up hard and straight, the limbs come off it in tiers, and the fan shaped leaves sit in flat sprays instead of a dome. Go in November. Ginkgo autumn is one of the few reliable spectacles in the plant world, because the leaves turn from green to a hard uniform yellow and then let go, very often most of them within a day or two, leaving a gold floor under a bare tree. Nobody records whether this one is male or female, so no promises about the fruit. Cities usually plant males, because the female drops a fleshy seed coat that smells strongly of rancid butter.

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Photo: Emmanuelbaltasar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Hackberry of the Valentino

Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · 100 to 200 years, by the regional register's age band · San Salvario

This one stands by itself on open grass, which is why it looks the way it does. A Mediterranean hackberry with room on every side builds a wide even dome, and this one carries twenty-three metres of height over a trunk four metres seventy-five round, at the northern end of Parco del Valentino near Corso Massimo d'Azeglio. Celtis australis is southern European, tough, and largely ignored, which is a shame, because the wood used to be the reason anyone cared about it. It is flexible enough that whip handles, walking sticks and pitchfork shafts were made from nothing else, and the trade lasted into the twentieth century. The leaves are lopsided at the base, long pointed, and rough on the upper side like fine sandpaper. In autumn the tree carries small dark fruits on long stalks that taste faintly of dates and that birds strip fast. It is the only hackberry on Turin's monumental register. The park it stands in opened in 1856 as the city's first public park, laid out in the French manner by the gardener Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, and everything else on this walk from here south is inside it.

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The Oak behind the Castello del Valentino

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · over 200 years, by the regional register's age band · San Salvario

Every other tree in Turin that the register dates past two hundred years is a plane. This oak is the exception, and it is the only reason the city's oldest age band contains a second species at all. It stands behind the Castello del Valentino near the rock garden the park calls the Rocaille, four metres round and twenty-eight metres tall. Quercus robur is the oak of northern European woodland and it is near its southern limit here on the Po plain, growing where the water table sits close enough to the surface to carry it through an Italian August. The castle it stands behind was rebuilt in the seventeenth century as the residence of Christine of France, and it has housed the city's engineering and architecture school since 1859, so the oak has spent most of its life being walked past by students who were not looking. The Rocaille is much newer than the tree: the artificial cliffs, streams and grottoes were built in 1961 for Italia 61, the exhibition marking a century of Italian unity. Look for a short heavy trunk and limbs coming off it almost horizontally, which is what an oak does when it grows with space around it.

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The Plane by the Eridano

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · over 200 years, by the regional register's age band · San Salvario

Six metres round, and it is the widest trunk in the park. This plane stands on the river side of Viale Virgilio opposite the Eridano, and the regional register puts it in the oldest band it uses, over two hundred years, which would make it older than the park around it. That is entirely possible. Parco del Valentino opened to the public in 1856, but the grounds of the Castello del Valentino had been Savoy property with planted avenues for two centuries before that, so a handful of trees here predate the park by a long way. It is not the tallest plane in Turin. At twenty-six metres it is fourteen short of the one waiting at the end of this walk, and the whole difference sits in the trunk: this tree put its growth sideways instead of up. That usually means light and space on every side rather than a place in a row. The Po running just behind it is the other half of the explanation, because a plane with its roots in a river's water table grows fat with very little effort. Stand at the base and the bark reads as a jigsaw of grey, olive and cream.

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The Plane at the Borgo Medievale

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 100 to 200 years, by the regional register's age band · San Salvario

The medieval village beside this tree was built in 1884 and there is nothing dishonest about it. Alfredo d'Andrade put up the Borgo Medievale for the Esposizione Generale Italiana as a full scale working model of a fifteenth century Piedmontese village, copying real buildings from real valleys, and it came out so well that the city kept it instead of pulling it down. The plane standing near it is thirty-six metres tall and five metres ten round, the second tallest tree on Turin's monumental register, and it is genuinely old in a way the village is not. The register bands it between one hundred and two hundred years, so it may well have been a young tree already standing when the exhibition opened. Three monumental oaks grow beside it, registered as a group rather than as individuals, which is why they get no entries of their own here. What makes this stretch worth slowing down for is the scale of the contrast: a row of low timber and stone houses with the roofline of a small mountain village, and then one tree going up more than twice their height directly behind them. The village courtyard is free to walk into.

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The Plane of the Fontana dei Dodici Mesi

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · over 200 years, by the regional register's age band · San Salvario

Forty metres, and nothing in Turin is taller. This plane stands beside the Fontana dei Dodici Mesi at the southern end of Parco del Valentino, and it clears the second tallest tree on the city's monumental register by four full metres. The fountain would be worth the walk on its own. Carlo Ceppi built it in 1898 for the Esposizione Generale Italiana, a great oval basin ringed by twelve statues, one for each month, with four more for the rivers of the Turin plain. The tree is older than the fountain. The register puts it past two hundred years, five and a half metres round, with a crown thirty-two metres across, the widest canopy it records anywhere in the city. Forty metres is a serious height for a plane growing outside a forest, and it happens here for the same reason the fountain does: the Po is a couple of hundred metres away and the water table under this end of the park never really drops. Come late in the afternoon, when the light comes up the river from the west and the statues are lit from behind. It is the last stop, and the tram back to Porta Nuova runs from Corso Massimo d'Azeglio.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Turin?: Probably the plane in Parco della Tesoriera, over 200 years old and 3.6 km west of this walk. Of the eight trees here, three sit in the register's oldest band: the two Valentino planes at the Eridano and the Fontana dei Dodici Mesi, and the oak behind the Castello del Valentino.
Can you walk between them?: Yes, and it is one straight line. All eight lie within a 1.9 km spread running south from Porta Nuova station to the Po, about three kilometres of actual walking and an easy afternoon. The first tree is sixty seconds from the platform.
Do any of them cost anything?: No. All eight stand in public gardens and parks that are free and open, and the regional register lists every one of them as publicly owned. Parco del Valentino, which holds five of the eight, has no gates.
Why are so many of Turin's monumental trees plane trees?: Seven of the fourteen on the regional register are London planes, including four of the five that the register dates past 200 years. The plane took over European city planting because it tolerates compacted soil, drought and dirty air, and along the Po it also gets a water table close to the surface, which is why Turin's grow so tall.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Turin? The full answer, with map and directions.
Species on this list: Every london plane on the site
More like this: Browse themed collections of remarkable trees.
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Walk all 8 trees about 3.8 km, 51 min on foot