The Dragon Tree of Quinta Conde dos Arcos

This dragon tree is more than twice as wide as it is tall: 6.2 metres of height under a crown almost 14 metres across, on a trunk 4.75 metres round. Dracaena draco grows that way on purpose. It puts up a stem, flowers, then forks, over and over, until an old one looks like an umbrella made of umbrellas. Nobody can date it properly. Dragon trees lay down no annual rings, so every age published for one is worked back from the branching or from records. The register recorded 200 years when it was measured in 2010, which makes it roughly 215 now, and that is about as precise as this species allows. It grows in the Quinta Conde dos Arcos, a private estate the Lisbon council expropriated in 1940 and later opened as a nine-hectare park in Olivais. The old palace holds the municipal gardening school. The parish council names this dragon tree as the one tree of public interest among the 28 species growing there, and runs free guided walks on set dates through the year. The sap runs red where the bark is cut, which is where the name comes from. Dragon's blood was shipped out of the Canaries and Madeira as a dye and a medicine for centuries before anyone thought to plant one of these in Lisbon.