The Fig of the Estrela Garden

The city of Lisbon has bolted a small metal plate to this trunk giving the species, the country it came from and, where the age should be, a single word: unknown. That is unusually honest for a municipality, and it is also the most interesting thing about the tree. The garden around it opened in April 1852 after ten years of stop-start construction, so the fig cannot be much more than a century and three quarters old, which for something this bulky is the surprise. Moreton Bay figs grow at a speed that makes ordinary trees look idle. The plate arrived in 2020, when Lisbon gave 27,610 of its trees an identity card and hung QR codes on around 750 of them. Look up and you see why this species unsettles people: aerial roots hang from the limbs like rope, and where they reach soil they thicken into new trunks, so the tree slowly becomes a colony of itself. It is not alone here either. At least five mature figs stand in these five hectares, and the one at the pond's edge, roots spilling over the kerb toward the ducks, is the one everybody photographs.