The Bunya Pine of the Teatre Grec

A bunya pine drops cones the size of a football that can weigh ten kilograms, from seventeen metres up. In Queensland, where the species is native, park keepers rope off the ground under them in season and put out warnings. Barcelona's specimen has been doing this quietly in the Teatre Grec gardens since about 1920, on the path just before the viewpoint, and the city catalogued it in 2011 as probably one of very few anywhere in town. Araucaria bidwillii is the last species left in its own section of the genus, a survivor of a lineage already ancient when the Jurassic ended, and it is built like nothing else on this hillside: a straight column with branches held out in flat symmetrical whorls, each one lined with stiff triangular leaves sharp enough to draw blood. In its homeland it reaches fifty metres. The seeds inside those cones are edible and starchy, and they are in no hurry, taking three to six months underground before anything appears above it. Look up rather than out. The crown is only about eight metres across, and it is the silhouette of the thing against the sky, all right angles where every other tree here has curves, that makes people stop on the path.