The Floss Silk Tree of Parque Genoves

Its name translates as the drunken stick, and one look at the trunk explains why. Ceiba speciosa, a floss silk tree from Argentina, Paraguay and southern Brazil, swells its bottle shaped trunk up to two metres across, studded with the conical thorns that in the wild deter animals from climbing it for water during the dry season. Cadiz's specimen grows in Parque Genoves, tucked behind the park's cafe near its fountain statue, a South American oddity planted alongside a dragon tree, a pohutukawa and an ombu in a 19th century garden built specifically to show off exactly this kind of imported curiosity. Like its neighbours, no planting record survives to date it precisely, only the trunk's own girth as evidence of age. When it flowers, usually toward autumn, the blooms come in shades of pink through white, briefly the showiest thing in a park that otherwise reads as a study in strange bark and stranger silhouettes. Free to visit, no ticket required, in a city whose 19th century merchants filled its public gardens with specimens from every port they traded through rather than sticking to anything native.