The Camphor Tree of the Historic Botanical Garden

This camphor tree is nearly twice as wide as it is tall. The city register puts its crown at 27 metres across and its height at only 15, the proportions of a tree that never had to compete for light and spread sideways instead, and its trunk measures 4.4 metres around. Camphor is what the wood smells of when it is cut, and for most of the twentieth century it was what mothballs and chest rubs were made from, distilled from chipped Cinnamomum camphora shipped out of Taiwan and Japan until the chemists worked out how to make it synthetically. Barcelona's tree was planted in 1933 in the Sector de la Masia of the old botanical garden on Montjuic, a collection laid out on ground reworked for the 1929 International Exposition. It has stood there through the war that broke out three years later, the decades afterwards when the garden was left to go half wild, and the opening of the new botanical garden further up the slope in 1999, which is what turned this one into the historic garden rather than simply the garden. The city catalogued it as a Tree of Local Interest in 1993. The land belongs to the science museum rather than the council, which is a matter of paperwork rather than a locked gate.