Ficus Gabriel Miró IV

Twenty-six metres is tall for a fig. This is the tallest of the four Moreton Bay figs on Plaza Gabriel Miró, 26.6 metres on the Valencian register, with a trunk 10.32 metres round, and it stands on its own at the southern end of the square, about forty metres from the other three. Nobody has dated it. What exists instead is the square. El Español puts the present layout at 1918, when the sculpture known as La Aguadora was installed, and treats that as roughly when these figs went into the ground. That is a reading of the setting rather than a record of a planting, so the honest figure is over a century, not a year. The species is Australian, from the wet coastal forests of Queensland and New South Wales, where it germinates high in the crown of another tree and lets its roots down the host's trunk to the soil. In a Spanish square it has to start at ground level like everything else, and it compensates from above: limbs that run out horizontally, aerial roots dropping from them, props thickening into a second and third trunk. El Español rates the Gabriel Miró group as probably the most notable ficus specimens in the country, with canopies over twenty-five metres. This one covers 31.5 metres of pavement.