The Weeping Fig of Campo Santana

Ficus benjamina is the tree most people know as a pot plant, the glossy thing sulking in an office corner and shedding leaves whenever somebody moves it. Fifty paces from the yew, on the same slope, one of them has a trunk five metres around and a crown twenty metres up. Portugal classified it on exactly the same day as the yew, 21 May 1968, and the national register still files it under a second name that says what the species does when nothing stops it: matapalo, tree killer. Like its Moreton Bay relatives it can begin high in another tree and work downward, and even planted honestly in soil it keeps the habit of letting fine roots down from the limbs. One useful correction before you go. The register maps a single specimen here. Portuguese sources describing the garden count two of them, classified together under the same 1968 diploma. That gap between a national list and what a city actually holds is completely normal, so expect a pair and stand at the bigger one. The garden around them runs to twenty eight tree species, a Himalayan cedar and a paper mulberry among them, so the fig is not the only import that outgrew its label.