The Silky Oak of Jardins dels Drets Humans

A Philips factory once stood where this Australian silky oak now grows, and the garden around it still carries the shape of that history: workers' flowerbeds laid out in the 1960s, redesigned decades later into a public park about human rights, its paths lined with 30 illuminated panels quoting the Universal Declaration article by article. The tree itself predates all of that. Barcelona catalogued it as a tree of local interest in 2011, and the city's own register puts it at a striking 4.1 metres round and 32 metres tall, among the largest silky oaks recorded anywhere outside Australia. An independent measurement taken in 2017 found a notably smaller trunk, 2.4 metres, which is either six years of unusually vigorous growth or two different ways of measuring the same tree. Both readings are kept here rather than picking one. Grevillea robusta is native to the subtropical rainforests of eastern Australia, grown worldwide as an ornamental and, more prosaically, as a nurse tree for coffee plantations. This one has nothing to nurse. It stands alone in a public garden built on land a factory once used for something else entirely.