Two registered figs stand about twenty metres apart here and they are visibly not the same tree. This is the taller one, 19 metres against its neighbour's 13, on the slimmer trunk, 6.35 metres round against 7.05, and it carries the wider crown at 21 metres. Same species, same park, same century, opposite habits: one built downwards into bulk, this one went up. Both are listed in the Valencian catalogue as monumental trees of local interest, and neither is given a name there. So this one is identified the way a visitor identifies it, by where it stands and what it looks like, and no source anywhere puts a date on it. Parque de Canalejas was laid out in 1886 and its Moreton Bay figs are described as over a hundred years old, which is the range that honestly applies. What the species offers at this size is the underside. Horizontal limbs, aerial roots hanging free of the ground with others already thick enough to carry weight, and surface roots running out across the soil in low ridges. It is an evergreen from the Australian east coast doing in a Mediterranean park what it does in a subtropical forest, minus the host tree it would normally have started in.
This tree looks much the same in every month of the year, so there is no season to chart.
Plaza Portal de Elche, AlicanteThe taller of the two figs standing twenty metres apart here, nineteen metres against thirteen, on the slimmer trunk and with the wider crown. It is the western one of the pair.
Free, public park/plaza area, no gate found
TRAM Luceros stop (lines L1-L4), roughly 10 minutes on foot
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: Catálogo de Árboles Monumentales y Singulares de la Comunitat Valenciana (Generalitat Valenciana), no. 303
- dadesobertes.gva.es
- elespanol.com
- alicante.es
- Generalitat Valenciana, Catalogo de Arboles Monumentales y Singulares de la Comunitat Valenciana (Ley 4/2006), no. 303