The Hornbeam of the Sot de l'Estany

Common hornbeam barely grows wild anywhere on the Iberian peninsula, which makes the specimen in Barcelona's Jardi Botanic Historic an outlier by definition. It has found the one pocket of the city cool and damp enough to suit it: the Sot de l'Estany, a shaded former quarry hollow that already holds four of Barcelona's officially monumental trees, a wingnut, two kinds of ash and a sycamore maple among them. At roughly 80 years old the hornbeam is younger than those neighbours, which is why the city lists it one rank down, as a tree of local interest rather than a monument. It has still reached 18 metres with a crown 13 metres across, respectable for a species this far outside its natural range. The garden was Barcelona's original botanical collection, on this same hill, before a newer one opened elsewhere on Montjuic. The ravine has kept its own microclimate ever since: cooler, wetter and stubbornly hospitable to trees with no business surviving this far south. Same ticket as the rest of the garden's veterans.