The Casuarina of the Cascada

Everything about this tree says pine, and none of it is true. What look like drooping grey-green needles are jointed green twigs doing the work of leaves, and the real leaves are microscopic scales in rings at each joint, visible only if you pull a strand apart. Its relatives are the oaks and the birches, with not a single conifer among them. The river she-oak went into the ground beside the Cascada around 1894, six years after the Universal Exposition turned a demolished fortress into Barcelona's first public park, and it has thickened into two trunks fused at the base that separate about 90 centimetres up. The combined perimeter passes five metres, one of the thickest trunks in the city, under a crown roughly 20 metres across; the city's own records put the height somewhere between 22 and 27 metres and cannot agree which. River she-oaks come from the riverbanks of eastern Australia, where they hold sandy banks together through flood season, and they were planted around the Mediterranean for exactly that toughness. Stand under it on a windy afternoon and the sound settles what the botany started: the hanging foliage catches wind with the same hiss a pine gives, from a tree that is nothing like one.