The Japanese Cheesewood of the Ciutadella

This is a hedge that got away. Pittosporum tobira is the standard clipped shrub of Mediterranean car parks and hotel forecourts, usually held below waist height and almost never allowed a single trunk at all. This one has a trunk 1.55 metres around and a crown six metres wide, which is why the city added it to the register of trees of local interest in 2017, the only one of its species on that list. The register does not even record a height for it, an omission that says something about how unexpected the entry is. It grows in the Parc de la Ciutadella in front of the Glorieta de la Transsexual Sonia, the park's old bandstand, which the city renamed for a woman killed there and which is now one of Barcelona's memorials to violence against trans people. The tree is the quiet part of that corner. In spring it carries small cream flowers that smell of orange blossom strongly enough to reach the path, which is where the plant's other name, mock orange, comes from. Nobody has dated it. Pittosporum thickens slowly enough that a trunk this size suggests decades rather than years, but the register gives no planting year and no second source offers one.