The Bottle Tree of the Torre Girona Gardens

The strangest tree in these gardens is the one you have to go looking for. A Catalan gardens journal that walked the Torre Girona grounds found the Brachychiton populneus halfway into the wooded part, off the obvious route, which is a fair description of how an Australian bottle tree ends up in a Barcelona park in the first place. It was planted around 1904, stands 22 metres tall and 2.5 metres round, and the city catalogued it in 1994. The name is the point: the trunk swells at the base into a bottle, storing water against drought in a way that looks slightly wrong to a European eye, like a tree drawn from memory. In its native eastern Australia the species is emergency fodder, felled for livestock when the paddocks fail. Here it has never once had to prove it. The estate around it was a banker's summer house from 1860 before the technical university built a campus on the grounds, which is why the walk to this tree goes past engineering buildings. The garden has been municipally managed since an April 2019 agreement and is genuinely open to the public, but the hours are posted, seasonal and gated after dark, and we could not confirm the current timetable, so treat a late visit as a gamble.