The Esterculia of Plaza Lavalle

Two trees of this species are known in the whole of Buenos Aires, and this is the one with an address. Sterculia coccinea is a tropical species from Southeast Asia, and the city's register lists it among the notable trees of Buenos Aires on rarity alone rather than for size or age: about eight metres tall, heavily branched, with a crown that spreads wider than the tree stands high. Its flowers come yellow green flushed with red in spring, and later in the year the capsules split open to show a bright red lining. The address is the point as much as the tree is. Plaza Lavalle sits between the Teatro Colon and the Palacio de Justicia, so this quiet tropical outsider has spent its life between the country's opera house and its supreme court, with the crowds that both of those attract passing underneath it. Nobody has dated it. No register, plaque or article we could find gives an age or a trunk measurement, and an empty field is better than an invented number. If you know when it went in, tell us and we will put it on the page. The pin marks the plaza rather than the trunk, so give yourself a minute to pick it out from the trees around it: look for the wide, low, many-branched crown near the Cordoba and Talcahuano corner.