The Ombu of Parque Genoves

This tree cannot be aged the normal way, because it does not grow the annual rings that make dating a trunk possible. Phytolacca dioica, the ombu, is technically an herbaceous plant that behaves like a tree, its trunk swollen not with wood but with water storing tissue soft enough that, unlike almost everything else in this park, it cannot be milled for lumber or dated by a cross section. What Cadiz's parks department can say is that it has stood in Parque Genoves long enough to reach a circumference of about five and a half metres and a height of nearly fifteen, a spongy grey mass of trunk that looks poured rather than grown. Native to the pampas of Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil, the ombu became a fixture of Spanish gardens the way palms and eucalyptus did elsewhere, brought back by a trading city that spent centuries filling its public spaces with whatever grew well in a similar climate somewhere else in the Spanish world. Its own bulk does the work other trees do with age or history: nobody needs telling this one is old, only shown its trunk. Free to see, alongside a dragon tree, a pohutukawa and a floss silk tree in the same 19th century garden.