The Taxodium of the Jardim da Parada

Six and a half metres around the trunk and twenty six metres up, this is the largest tree in a garden that fills one whole city block, and for four years it has been at the centre of an argument about a railway. Lisbon is building a metro station under Campo de Ourique. The worksite takes a slice of the garden, residents formed a movement to stop it, and in 2024 they tied coloured ribbons through the branches: black for a tree to be felled, red for high risk of dying, yellow for at risk. The metro company's public answer was a twenty metre radius around the garden's three classified trees with no work inside it and continuing health checks, with six unclassified hackberries taken out instead, four of them replanted in the same holes. The tree carries a small taxonomic dispute of its own. The national register lists it as Taxodium mucronatum, the Montezuma cypress of Mexican riverbanks, the species that produced the widest trunk ever measured on a tree. The parish council and the Portuguese encyclopedia both call it a bald cypress. Nobody has published a resolution. The garden was the parade ground of the Campo de Ourique barracks, which is why nobody calls it by the president's name.