The Himalayan Spruce of the Plaza de Murillo

Of the four conifers catalogued in the Plaza de Murillo, this is the one nobody can name. Picea smithiana grows wild between two and nearly four thousand metres up, in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Nepal and Tibet, and reached Europe in 1818 when seed arrived in Scotland. It has the longest needles of any spruce and the most extreme weeping habit in the genus: the side branches hang almost vertically off the limbs, so a mature tree looks like it is slowly melting. This one is 22 metres tall with a trunk 1.85 metres around. Its age is honestly unsettled. The city's guides say 140 years; the botanical account attached to the square claims a planting around 1790, which would make it older than the Botanic Garden's present layout and older than nearly anything else rooted along the Paseo del Prado. The species honours Sir James Edward Smith, who founded the Linnean Society and bought Linnaeus's entire collection at twenty-four. Its other name, morinda, is a Himalayan word for flower honey and refers to the resin that beads on the young cones. A high-altitude spruce is the wrong tree for a Madrid summer by every measure that matters, which is what makes it worth standing under.