The Hackberry of the Cypress Cottage

Hackberry wood was cheap and ordinary enough that for centuries nobody thought to plant it for looks: it went into barrel staves, walking sticks, fishing rods and farm tools, and children used its small dark berries as ammunition for peashooters, the kind of tree valued for use rather than admired for size. This one at La Concepcion grew past all of that. Standing beside a building the garden calls the Casita de los Cipreses (Cypress Cottage), it now measures roughly 24 metres tall with a trunk 3.72 metres around, dimensions the garden's own record and an independent tree-history blog both describe as probably the largest and best-preserved hackberry anywhere in Malaga province. Celtis australis can live to six hundred years in the right conditions, which makes this specimen, at an estimated two centuries old, still comfortably short of its own species' ceiling. It grows within a botanical collection assembled since 1855 specifically to bring together trees too large or too rare to encounter anywhere else nearby, and next to the garden's showier imports, palms and figs from three continents, this unglamorous, useful species holds its own purely on scale.