The Date Palm of the Ninth of April Garden

Lisbon's city hall calls this the tallest tree in the city and puts it at 38 metres, four metres over the triumphal arch at the bottom of the Baixa. The national register measured it in 2015 and wrote down 26.7. Both figures are published, neither has been reconciled, and standing at the foot of it you will not settle the question either, because a date palm gives the eye nothing to measure against: no branches, no taper, just a grey column of old leaf bases and then a burst of fronds a long way up. Phoenix dactylifera is a desert crop from Mesopotamia and North Africa, grown for its fruit for at least five thousand years and almost never allowed to get this tall, because an orchard keeps its palms low enough to climb and harvest. Nobody was harvesting this one. It was classified in 2001 along with the tipuana and the flame tree beside it, and the register's clock puts it near 145 years. The trunk is barely one and a half metres around. It has held all that up for a century and a half, on the lip of a terrace above the Tagus that flatters the height even further.