The Dragon Tree of the Estrela Garden

Nobody can tell you how old this tree is, and that is a property of the species rather than a gap in the paperwork. A dragon tree is not a tree in the ordinary sense: it lays down no annual rings, so the one method that reliably ages an oak or a beech simply does not apply. Botanists count branch generations instead, because the crown forks only after each flowering, which happens at intervals of a decade or more. What that produces is this shape, a trunk splitting into a tight umbrella of stiff blue-green blades that looks less grown than engineered. Cut the bark and the sap runs red, which is where the name comes from and why the resin was traded across medieval Europe as dragon's blood, used for varnish, medicine and dye. The species belongs to the Canary Islands and Madeira, where it is now scarce in the wild. This one has stood among the palms and benches near the centre of the garden since some point after 1852, quietly outliving every gardener who has worked around it, and Lisbon has a second on our map in the botanical garden at Ajuda.