The Stone Pine of Silvares

This pine is as wide as it is tall and it stands in the middle of a roundabout. Portugal's register measures it at 26 metres high with a crown 26.4 metres across, on a trunk 3.8 metres round, held over a road junction on the old ER 206 in Silvares. It was 100 years old when the register measured it in 2011, which makes it about 115 now, and it was classified of public interest in June that year. Guimaraes municipality has exactly three stone pines with that status and this was the first. Pinus pinea is the umbrella pine, the silhouette on every postcard of the Portuguese coast, and the shape is not decoration. It sheds its lower branches as it goes up and pushes everything sideways into a flat parasol on a bare column, a design for catching light above competitors rather than beside them. In a plantation it does this modestly. With light on every side, as here, it does it to the limit, which is how a tree ends up with a crown wider than it is tall. It also drops pinhoes, the pine nuts that go into Portuguese Christmas cooking. The cones take three years on the branch before they open, which is a long wait for one afternoon of gathering. There is no gate and no ticket here. There is a roundabout, and a hundred-year-old parasol standing in the middle of it.