The London Plane of the Vil.la Amelia Gardens

Twenty-six metres tall and 26 metres across, which is what a plane tree looks like when it has never had to compete for anything. It was planted in 1920 in what were then the private grounds of the Quinta Amelia, the estate the banker Ignasi Girona built and named for his wife, Amelia de Vilanova, and it has had open lawn around it ever since. A note on its age, because descriptions of the garden get this one wrong. Several still call it a plane of nearly 90 years, a figure copied forward from whenever it was first written down. The city register's planting year makes it 106. The garden changed a great deal more than the tree did. Barcelona took the estate over and the mansion came down; sources disagree on the year, giving 1930 in some accounts and 1969 in others, and we have not been able to settle which is right. The layout you walk through now dates from a 1970 redesign by Joaquim Casamor, the city's director of parks and gardens, who kept the mature trees and built a public garden around them. A bronze dryad, a tree nymph, by Ricard Sala stands in the central pond, which is either a coincidence or somebody's quiet joke about what the garden is actually for.