The Himalayan Cedar of Plaza del Cardenal Toledo

The square was arranged around the tree. Plaza del Cardenal Toledo got its garden in 1945, and this deodar was already standing, so the paths and the benches went where the cedar allowed them. It remains effectively the only tree on the square, twenty-two and a half metres of it, which on a small plaza north of the Mezquita means it is also the roof. Cordoba's catalogue of singular trees put it at about a hundred and two years old at survey, which is a floor rather than a figure, since it has gone on growing since somebody wrote that down. The catalogue is also the only source that says anything about this tree. Nothing else names it, which is ordinary for a square cedar and worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. Cedrus deodara comes from the western Himalaya, from Afghanistan through Kashmir into Nepal, where it is a timber tree of high mountain forest and where the Sanskrit name means the wood of the gods. In Andalusia it is an ornamental, planted through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into gardens and new squares, and it does well as long as it is watered. The habit gives it away from a distance: a straight leader, branches sweeping down and out, every shoot tip drooping, so the whole tree looks like it is leaning slightly towards you.