Rome (AFP)

A plane tree cloned from an extremely rare specimen from the 17th century and cultivated in France has been planted in the park of Villa Borghese in Rome, project officials said on Tuesday.

This "Platanus Orientalis" comes from a branch, carrying a leaf, discovered in the hollow trunk of "Adonis", a majestic tree standing in the "Valley of the plane trees" located in the Roman park.

"For the first time in 400 years, an extraordinary oriental plane tree has been planted [in the Roman park]. It is a clone of one of the plane trees planted by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1605", details the association Les Amis of Borghese on his Facebook page.

"The plane tree is six years old but its genetic heritage has more than four centuries", she underlined, specifying that today only 11 specimens of these trees born in the time of Caravaggio remained in the park and of Galilee.

Artificial cuttings had previously been tried, without result.

Alix Van Buren, president of the Friends of Villa Borghese association, uprooted the stem, potted it and saw it gradually give off leaves.

Then she put it in the ground in her property in Salernes, near Draguignan (southern France), the Villa Pergola, so that it could flourish in the ground, she explained to AFP.

For Claire Atgen, a French botanist called by Alix Van Buren to the bedside of the Borghese plane trees, the cloning of the old plane tree was made possible by a phenomenon of "spontaneous cuttings".

"Plants have the propensity to make suckers and if the suckers are close to soil, they will be able to take root," she told AFP.

In the United States, the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive association also succeeded in replicating, but thanks to an "in vitro" cloning, "The tree of Hippocrates" in Greece, a plane tree under which, according to legend, the doctor dispensed his lessons.

The "Valley of the plane trees", entrusted to the care of two French botanists, Pascal Genoyer and Claire Atger, is the only urban island of ancient plane trees of the East listed in the West, according to Alix Van Buren.

"This important result represents an important first step for the protection, reproduction and conservation of the genetic heritage of ancient trees in Rome," said the manager of green spaces in the Italian capital, Laura Fiorini.

Nephew and secretary of Pope Paul V, patron and great art lover, Scipione Borghese had the Villa Borghese built at the start of the 17th century to house his prestigious collections of paintings and sculptures.

He also designed elegant gardens enhanced with fountains and served by wide tree-lined paths.

In his Provencal villa, Alix Van Buren also owns the clone of a 16th century white oak, direct descendants of 17th and 18th century cypress trees, as well as the offspring of a thousand-year-old cypress known as Saint-Jean Baptiste, from Ein. Karem in Jerusalem.

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