The Sequoias of the Generalife's Upper Gardens

Coast redwoods reached Europe in 1843, and Granada planted some of the continent's first within little more than a decade, sequoias going into the Generalife's Upper Gardens between 1854 and 1856, while the gardens were still privately owned ground. Sequoia sempervirens can live three thousand years and grow past 100 metres in its native California; these specimens, still comparatively young, have nonetheless become some of the tallest living things inside the Alhambra complex. Granada's connection to the species runs oddly deeper than that planting date suggests. In 1926 an American botanist examining a separate, older redwood elsewhere on the grounds calculated it was roughly 120 years old, old enough to have been planted before European science had formally identified the coast redwood at all, a puzzle eventually attributed to Thaddaeus Haenke, a naturalist on the 1791 Malaspina expedition who is thought to have carried seed back from California decades before the species reached botanical record books. That original mystery tree died sometime before 2002. The sequoias standing in the Upper Gardens today are the later, better-documented planting, reachable only with a paid, timed Alhambra and Generalife ticket.