The Silky Oaks of Passeig de Canalejas

Two trees standing eleven metres apart agree on their height to within a metre and disagree on their waistline by a factor of three. The Generalitat's monumental-tree catalogue registers them separately: one 19 metres tall with a trunk 1.05 metres round, the other 18 metres tall with a trunk of 3.75. Diario Información's 2013 survey of the city's tallest and oldest treats them as a matched pair at either end of the Canalejas fig alignment, around 19 metres, both of them over a century old. Nothing in the record explains the gap between those two trunks, so it stays a gap. Neither of them is an oak. Grevillea robusta comes from the subtropical forests of eastern Australia, a relative of the banksia and the macadamia, and the Spanish name it goes by here, roble australiano, describes a leaf and nothing else. It also grows fast, which makes a trunk a poor clock: the century these two are credited with comes from the newspaper, not from a tape measure round the base. The promenade itself was laid out to an 1886 design by the municipal architect José González Altés. No source records when the two silky oaks went in. They have spent their catalogued lives as the bookends of somebody else's avenue: the Moreton Bay figs between them are the trees people stop for, one of them nearly twelve metres round at the base. The pair stands at the ends of the row, easy to walk past a hundred times.