Ficus of Parque de Canalejas

Seven metres of trunk holding up thirteen metres of tree. That ratio is the reason to stop here: the Valencian catalogue measures this fig at 7.05 metres round and only 13 metres tall, with a crown of 16, so from the path it reads as a wide grey mass at ground level with a fairly modest tree on top of it. On a Moreton Bay fig the trunk is not really one stem. Aerial roots come down from the limbs, meet the soil, thicken, take load and fuse into the column, so a girth figure on this species measures the result of a process rather than a single stem that grew outwards. Seven metres of it is a lot of process. The register lists this tree without a name, as a monumental tree of local interest, one of four standing within about twenty-five metres of each other. Nobody has dated it. What it has is the age the park has: Parque de Canalejas was laid out in 1886 and its Moreton Bay figs are described as more than a century old, which is a range rather than a birthday. The park is free, open and a couple of minutes' walk from the four big figs on Plaza Gabriel Miró.