The Pica-Pica Tree of the Teatre Grec

Barcelona planted this tree for its flowers and got itching powder with them. The lagunaria is known across Catalonia as the pica-pica, the scratch-scratch, because the inside of its seed capsules is packed with fine bristles that break off into skin and stay there. The flowers are the reason anyone forgives it. Once a year the whole crown fills with thousands of pink blooms shaped like mallows, which is a strange thing to find fifteen metres up, because flowers like that normally belong to weeds on a roadside verge. The city's own assessment says no other lagunaria in Barcelona, and fewer than half a dozen have ever been planted here, has grown into anything close to this shape. It went into the ground in 1923, while the whole hillside was being rebuilt from quarry workings into gardens for the 1929 International Exposition, and it now stands to the left of the amphitheatre below the restaurant terrace with a trunk 2.4 metres round. The species comes from Norfolk Island and Lord Howe Island in the Pacific, where it grows on sea cliffs. Time the visit: the gardens shut to the public from 15 June to 7 August for the festival that fills the theatre.