The Caucasian Wingnut of the Giardino Sambuy

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.