The Strawberry Tree of the Plaza de la Lealtad

Madrid's coat of arms shows a bear reaching up into a strawberry tree, and this is the closest thing the city has to the original. It stands in the southern corner of the Plaza de la Lealtad, opposite the Ritz, propped on iron crutches installed when its own limbs grew heavy enough to threaten pulling it over. Strawberry trees are usually shrubs, three or four metres of Mediterranean scrub. This one has been allowed to grow into an actual tree for more than a century, which is why the props are needed at all. It is also why the Comunidad de Madrid added it to the singular-tree catalogue in 2015 for cultural rather than botanical significance: the emblem, made real. Historians are fairly sure the heraldic tree of 1222 was never a madrono in the first place and that the bear on the crest was reaching for something else entirely, but the city has committed. The fruit is the payoff. Through November and December it carries white bell flowers and the previous year's fruit at the same time, red warty spheres that look like lychees and taste of very little. The Latin unedo means eat only one.