The Siberian Elm of the Alcazar

A Siberian elm is not supposed to reach twenty-seven metres. The species rarely passes fifteen, which is part of why it was planted across Spain in such numbers during the twentieth century: fast, cheap, indifferent to drought and poor soil, resistant to the Dutch elm disease that was destroying the country's field elms, and modest enough not to become a problem later. This one ignored the brief. It grows inside the gardens of the Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos, among the long water channels and clipped hedges laid out below the fortress, where nearly everything else is kept to a shape. The elm was allowed to run. Cordoba's catalogue of singular trees records its height and its species and nothing about its age, and no other source names it, so how it got here and when is simply not documented. Reaching it costs money for most of the year, since the Alcazar charges admission, though on summer mornings the gardens are free. That is a real difference from the cypress standing outside the same gate, and worth knowing before you plan the walk. Ulmus pumila comes from the steppe of northern China, Mongolia and eastern Siberia, ground where trees stay short because the wind and the drought keep them there. Give it Andalusian irrigation and a garden that never let it go without, and it turns into this.