The Mexican White Pine of the Cova da Raposa

Cova da Raposa means the fox's hollow, and what grows in it is a pine from the highlands of Mexico and Central America, forty metres of it. Pinus ayacahuite has taken the height here and skipped the bulk. Forty metres tall on a trunk 2.55 metres round makes it taller than any of the four protected cypresses on this page and considerably narrower than all of them, a shape you notice from directly underneath: the crown starts a long way up and the trunk goes to it almost without a bend. It belongs to the same imported collection as those cypresses, a hillside filled with conifers from four continents behind one wall and kept up since by the state that manages the forest now. A walk of twenty minutes here crosses more of the world's mountain ranges than most botanical gardens manage in a hectare. The register gives its age as about a hundred years and records no date for that count, so the honest reading is somewhere between ninety and a hundred and thirty. Like the big cypress standing a short walk away by the Casa de Guarda do Serpa, it falls outside the 2018 decree that classified the forest's better known trees. It holds its protection on its own paperwork instead, which is a thinner kind of fame and no reason to walk past it.