The Bald Cypress of Deusto

A tree from the swamps of the American south stands at the front door of a Basque university, looking across the river at the Guggenheim. Bald cypress belongs in standing water in Louisiana and Florida, and this one has spent its life on a paved forecourt in rainy Bilbao, at the entrance to the 1886 main building of the Universidad de Deusto. The Bilbao history site Absolut Bilbao puts it at nearly 25 metres tall, with a crown more than eight metres across and a trunk around three metres thick. Treat those numbers as reported rather than measured: they come from a single source, and three metres of trunk would be exceptional for the species outside its native bottomlands. Large, and roughly stated, is the honest reading. Its party trick is seasonal. Taxodium distichum is a conifer that goes bare, turning rust and copper in November and dropping its needles while the evergreens around it stay green, which is the thing visitors argue about before somebody looks it up. The building behind it dates from 1886 and the tree stands on its forecourt, but nothing we could reach dates the tree, and a university campus plants trees in every decade of its life. This one may be original to the building or may be decades younger. Nobody has put a number on it. If you know when it went in, or have taken a tape to that trunk, tell us.