The Magnolia of the Maternity Gardens

This magnolia is probably the biggest of its kind in Barcelona, and it grows in a garden built for a maternity hospital that no longer delivers babies. The Jardins de la Maternitat sit on the old Can Cavaller estate, developed from 1889 into a Modernista hospital complex by the architect Camil Oliveres, and the grounds kept their original planting long after the wards changed use. The magnolia itself has no recorded planting date, only a description in the city's own tree records as centenaria, over a hundred years old, which places its origin somewhere in the hospital's early decades. It has since spread past 12 metres tall and over 15 metres wide, a canopy wide enough to shade a small plaza on its own, among roughly forty tree species catalogued across the gardens. Southern magnolias flower in early summer with blooms that can reach 30 centimetres across, a single-species argument for why a hospital garden was worth keeping intact once the hospital itself moved on.