The Olive of the Botanical Garden Gate

Almost every olive tree you have ever seen has been pruned. Farmers cut them low and open so the fruit can be reached, and after a few centuries of that the species is known by a shape it never chose. This one was left alone. It stands on the entrance plaza of Barcelona's historic botanical garden, inside the gate behind the MNAC car park, and according to the garden's 2009 guide it has grown freely for more than seventy years without the pressures of agriculture, into a form that is almost impossible to see in the wild. The friends' association measured it at nine metres in 2017, tall and narrow for an olive, and wrote that it keeps its original shape because it has never been pruned. The plaza around it is the garden's front room, with a group of cycads, a Brazilian araucaria and a pair of junipers for company. Pius Font i Quer began the garden here in 1930 with one of the first plants a chaste tree carried over from the Ciutadella park, to mark the new garden as the heir of the old natural history museum, and a cutting of that chaste tree still grows beside this olive. The garden is free to enter, and the tree is the first thing worth stopping for.