The Strangler Fig of Príncipe Real

Everyone in this square looks at the cypress. It sits under a metal frame like a green table, it was the first tree in Lisbon given legal protection, in 1940, and it takes all the photographs. Three Australian figs stand around it and almost nobody registers them, which is odd, because they are the reason the square feels roofed. This one carries the thickest trunk of the three, just over six metres around, and holds its crown twenty one metres up. Ficus macrophylla does not start life as a tree in Australia. It germinates in the fork of another one, drops roots down the host's trunk and thickens them until the host is enclosed and dies, which is why the species is called a strangler. Here it had nothing to strangle, so the aerial roots simply hang, reach the gravel and stiffen into props. Underneath all of this is water. The Patriarcal reservoir was finished in 1864, an octagonal chamber on thirty one pillars holding 880 cubic metres for the city, and the garden is its lid. On Saturday mornings a producers' market sets up between the trunks.