The Osage Oranges of the Torre Girona Gardens

The city catalogued fourteen trees here as one. Osage oranges grow as a double row buried in the wooded part of the Torre Girona gardens, planted so long ago and grown so thoroughly into the surrounding vegetation that Barcelona's own tree register lists them under a single heritage number rather than fourteen separate entries, the same treatment it gives the garden's own stone pines a short walk away. The ajuntament's own record calls the species barely used today, with very few examples left anywhere in the city, which is what makes an old, unbothered row of them worth finding rather than an ordinary planting. Maclura pomifera comes from the south-central United States, the Arkansas and Louisiana river country that gave the local Catalan name tarongers de Louisiana, Louisiana oranges, for the huge, wrinkled, inedible fruit that female trees carry. Osage Nation bowyers once prized its wood above every other American timber for its spring, which is where the tree gets its English name. In this garden it has spent its life doing nothing more dramatic than standing, on ground that went from a banker's private estate to a university campus with a supercomputer installed in its old chapel, and has been a public city park since April 2019. Nobody has recorded when these went in. The register leaves the planting year blank, 'to be determined', still unresolved after a century of city cataloguing. If you know, the page welcomes the correction.