The Tipuana of the Ninth of April Garden

This garden is named after a defeat. On 9 April 1918 the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps was overrun at La Lys in Flanders in the course of one morning, and Lisbon put the date on a small terrace above the river. The tipuana shades most of it: twenty two metres tall, three and a fifth metres round the trunk, classified in 2001 along with two neighbours, and by the national register's arithmetic somewhere near 145 years old now. Tipuana tipu is Bolivian and Argentine, a legume that behaves like a plane tree in Mediterranean cities and gets planted everywhere for it, along whole Lisbon avenues. What it does that plane trees do not is drip. In warm months the canopy releases a fine sticky rain, honeydew from the sap-feeding insects living in it, and anyone who has parked a car under one does not do it twice. The ground itself was the walled garden of the Albertas, a Carmelite convent, before the city took it over. Two older names for the place survive in daily use because of that, Jardim das Albertas and Jardim da Rocha do Conde de Óbidos. Walk to the parapet and the Tagus opens up, container cranes and all.