The Mastic of Torrent

This is a shrub, and Catalonia has protected it by law. Mastic grows all over the dry Mediterranean as waist-high scrub, the stuff you push through on a coastal path, and it is normally counted in bushes rather than trunks. This one is 5.5 metres tall with a trunk 1.90 metres round and a crown 8 metres across, which for the species is off the scale, and it happens beside the junction of the C-255 and the GI-652 outside Torrent, where anybody can stop and look at it. Catalonia declared it a monumental tree in 1991. Mastic is the plant that gives mastic gum, the resin tapped on Chios and chewed for three thousand years, which is where the English word masticate comes from; the Catalan trade never mattered much, so nothing was ever taken from this one. What it took to get here is simply time and nobody clearing the ground. The register records its condition as normal and, as always, no age. A mastic this size is the best argument on this site for the idea that any species becomes remarkable if left alone long enough.