The Jujube of the Jardins Joan Maragall

This garden opens two days a week, which is most of the reason almost nobody has seen the tree in it. The Jardins Joan Maragall surround the Palauet Albeniz, a small neoclassical pavilion built for the 1929 International Exposition and kept ever since as the residence the Spanish royal family uses when it is in Barcelona. The public is let in at weekends. The jujube standing there was planted in 1958, reaches 10 metres with a 1.6 metre trunk and a crown 12 metres across, and was catalogued as a tree of local interest in 1998. Ziziphus jujuba has been cultivated in China for something like four thousand years, which makes it one of the oldest orchard trees on earth, and it reached the Mediterranean early enough that the Romans were already growing it. The fruit is the size of an olive and turns from green to a deep red brown. Fresh it tastes like a slightly floury apple; dried and wrinkled it tastes like a date, which is where the English name Chinese date came from. It is a thorny, slow, obstinate tree that will grow in poor dry ground, and it is planted here purely as an ornamental. Check the opening days: on a weekday the gate is as close as you get.