The Jacaranda of the Orive Garden

For four hundred years nobody outside could see this tree. It grew in a walled orchard belonging first to a Dominican convent, on ground granted in 1241, and then to a Renaissance palace built in 1560 by the architect Hernan Ruiz II, and the gate was only opened to the public in 2004. It has come close to dying twice since. Naturalists recording it note that it barely survived the freeze of 2003, when Cordoba hit nine degrees below zero, and the municipal catalogue records the winters of 2010 and 2011 killing jacarandas across the city while this one held on. What stands there now is three trunks grown together into what looks like one tree, spreading a crown twenty metres across at nearly nineteen metres tall, probably the largest of its kind in the city. For most of the year it is a fine green canopy over a quiet square. For a couple of weeks in May it turns violet, flowering largely before the new leaves arrive, which is the whole reason jacarandas were planted across southern Spain in the first place.