The Barbary Thuja of the Palau de Pedralbes Gardens

There are only a handful of these in any European garden. Tetraclinis articulata, the Barbary thuja or arar, grows wild in Morocco, Tunisia, Malta and one relict pocket of southeast Spain, and it is a threatened conifer at home, which makes a century-old specimen in a Barcelona park a genuine oddity rather than an ornamental choice. It was planted here around 1923 and catalogued as a Tree of Local Interest in 1993. Its measurements depend on who took them and when. The city register gives 14 metres of height on a trunk 1.2 metres round; a Barcelona flora survey devoted to this exact tree gives 10 metres and a narrower crown. Both agree on the species, the planting year and the protected status, so the honest answer is that it stands somewhere between the two figures, and is shorter than nearly everything around it either way. Up close it does not read as a conifer at all. The foliage is jointed and scaled, flattened into small articulated sprays, and the cones are four-valved and woody, closer to a piece of hardware than to a pine cone. The resin the species bleeds is sandarac, which was the standard varnish for furniture and instruments for centuries. It is the least conspicuous tree in these gardens and the one a botanist would walk to first.