The River Red Gum of the Celia Méndez Garden

The thickest trunk in Cordoba's catalogue of singular trees belongs to an Australian. This river red gum measures 4.86 metres around and stands 34.8 metres tall in a public park three kilometres east of the Mezquita, well outside the ring of old trees the city puts on its maps. It is there because the ground used to be huertas, the irrigated market gardens that fed Cordoba along the Guadalquivir before the city grew east across them. The catalogue calls this tree a relict of those gardens. Eucalyptus camaldulensis follows watercourses in its own country and was planted across Spain in the twentieth century for that exact habit, cheap timber on wet ground, and this one outlived the reason it was put in. One caution, plainly. The municipal catalogue is the only source that records this tree at all. Searching for it turns up a different and better-known Cordoba eucalyptus several kilometres away, so anyone checking online will most likely end up reading about the wrong one. The girth and the height are the city's own measurements and nobody has published a second set. No age is on file, and none should be guessed. Red gums put on bulk fast where there is water, so five metres of trunk here does not imply centuries, and nothing in the record claims them.